Five for Friday!

I'm not sure about everyone else, but when I actually do my Five for Friday post on a Friday I really feel as if I have my life together! :)  Here are some random moments from my week.

It's that time of the year when I really start to see some lovely progress with my kidlets' writing.  We've been using our Spacemen Spacers to make sure our sentences are easy to read and I'm seeing more kidlets spelling 'tricky sounds' correctly in their words.  I also love that full stops are appearing at the end of sentences instead of between random words :)

Next step is to make sure we're choosing interesting and exciting words in our stories!

Every time I walk past the garden near my classroom and see the gorgeous sunflowers blooming there my heart lifts a little.

Sunflowers must be the most cheerful of all the flowers!

This morning we played a new 'game' my teaching partner found on TpT.  Spelling CVC Words - Can you beat the computer? was a HUGE hit!  Each slide shows a picture, and the aim is for kidlets to write the word correctly before the letters appear on the screen.

This was great practice for my little learners who are still working on their segmenting skills, and a speed challenge for the others.  I love that the photo shows two kidlets cheering because they beat the computer. :)

This morning I saw a post on Facebook that made my heart skip a beat... 'The Magic Faraway Tree' is being made into a movie!

I really, really, really hope that the characters and magic lands live up to the ones I created in my imagination when I was growing up!  My greatest wish when I was about 9 was that one day I would get to climb the Faraway Tree myself - I was convinced that Silky and I would be best friends. :)

Because I am such a party animal I'm spending my Friday night doing laundry and finishing off a pack for TpT.  Here's a sneak peek:

If you've read my blog before you'll know that I love combining hands-on and fine motor activities with literacy and numeracy concepts.  This little ditty focuses on digraphs and as soon as I've added cards with words as well as pictures it will be ready to upload!  Fingers crossed I don't get distracted by 'Say Yes to the Dress'!!

~Update! I did get distracted by Friday night TV but got this pack uploaded today. :) Check it out here!~

Thanks so much for popping by!  Be sure to visit the linky to see what everyone else has been up to this week. :)

Phonics, Grammar and Writing Fun Inspired by the Green Sheep!

Do you read Mem Fox's 'Where is the Green Sheep?' with your class?  I love it!  Not only are the illustrations just gorgeous, but it provides perfect teaching opportunities for a number of concepts.  This week we enjoyed this story as part of our phonics work (learning about the digraph /sh/), to work on grammar (learning what an antonym is) and as a prompt for some very cute writing.  Today I've stopped by to share a few photos of our Green Sheep inspired fun!

We started by reading the story together.  I always love how enthralled kidlets are with a good book, even when they've heard it a million times before! :) I then explained that to discover our sound of the day they needed to search around the room to find the Green Sheep that I had hidden.  Don't forget that the Green Sheep will be sleeping - we crept silently around the room so as not to wake them.

After each kidlet had found a Green Sheep card, they brought them back to the carpet and read the word printed on their card to me.  This is when we discovered that our phonics focus for the day was /sh/ - although I'm not sure it was much of a state secret!! :)  We added the words to a poster and finished off with our Sound Waves workbook page.

Later in the day we revisited our favourite woolly friend with some work on antonyms. Coming up with engaging ideas to teach grammar to 5 year olds is sometimes tricky, so I gave myself a little pat on the back when I thought of using this book to help! We revised what an antonym was, and found some in the pages of the book.  

Then we made a list of our own.  Warning: If you like to make sure all posters and anchor charts in your room are pretty and cute you might like to skip over the next photo.  I don't want to upset you!

Then it was time to put our writer's hats on and get to work creating pages for a class book!  I explained that each kidlet would write two pages, one for each of their sheep.  The idea was that they would stick to antonym pairs, but I wasn't too fussy with this.  I absolutely love how these pages turned out!! I still have to pop them in a display folder with a cover so I can add our cute sheep to the class library.

Our last bit of Green Sheep fun was with games in reading groups.  Kidlets had been playing Fox in the Hen House to practise reading /sh/, /ch/ and /th/ words during their guided reading time with me, and I added an old favourite as a fast finisher for those who got their sight word rotation done quickly. This game is my best seller - it's in Queensland font with our high frequency words, but a Dolch version is coming soon!

In the past I've also done a directed drawing art activity using markers and watercolours, but we ran out of time for that this week.  Here's a pic of last year's creations:

I hope you were able to grab an idea or two to use in your classroom with 'Where is the Green Sheep?' - I'd love to hear from you if any work for you. :)

Hey Presto! {Pin it to win it!}

This year my class is full of very high energy, exuberant characters.  I love them to bits... but boy are they tricky to find resources for!  They love games and hands on activities, and seem to really be motivated by competition... with fickle attention spans! What's new for 5 year olds, right?  Combining all this with the fact that many of them need to become much more fluent with their reading (at various skill levels) sent me on a mission to create a set of games that would allow them to read, play and win! Today... my mission was completed. :)

I have kidlets in my class who are working on reading CVC words, some who are ready for trickier words, and some who need practice reading simple sentences.  I wanted to make games that were essentially the same concept (similar to Bang!-type games) so that when each new pack was introduced the format was familiar to my kidlets while still focusing on their ability level.  I started by making Shark! (CVC words) and then moved on to Fox in the Hen House! for digraphs and Shiver Me Timbers! for sentences.  Today I finished Hey Presto! and am so excited to use it for my little learners who need to practice reading long vowel 'Magic E' words! :)

I'm so hoping that these resources can be of use to others!  How about a giveaway? Pin any of the below images to WIN the game of your choice!  Pin more than one image for extra chances to win. :) (Don't forget to leave a comment with the link to your pin.)

Happy Thursday, friends! I hope you are enjoying cable TV and the good wine like I am... but then you might not be at your parent's house. :)