Fun and Practical Ideas for Primary Classrooms
Alphabet poems are a fun way to help young learners practice letters and sounds! These alphabet poems for each letter A–Z are perfect for building letter recognition, phonics skills, and fluency through shared reading in preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. Plus, they’re funny and kids love them! How I Use Alphabet Poems for Shared Reading These Alphabet Poems are fantastic… Read More
The end of the school year is such a busy and sometimes stressful time for students and teachers! Changes to schedules, celebration events, special activities, strong emotions, and more take up time and can throw off your usual classroom routines. That’s why I LOVE our End of the Year book! It’s such a fun way to review our year together,… Read More
After 20+ years of teaching, I’ve done a lot of different things for reading homework. I stopped doing reading logs several years ago because I didn’t feel it was meaningful. Sometimes, families were just rushing to write down book titles to get “credit” for homework, instead of focusing on the fun and important work of enjoying books together. Another reading… Read More
Decodable readers are a great way to help beginning readers put their phonics skills into practice. With simple, targeted text, students can practice decoding words, build fluency, and gain confidence as readers. In this post, I’ll share easy and effective ways to use decodable readers in your first grade classroom. I’ve used my short vowel decodable readers in reading groups,… Read More
We have a lot of fun with this each year and I always look forward to it! It’s a fun way for my students to focus on the changing spring weather and to track what they observe each day. They get so excited to check out the weather at recess each day. I start off by reading the book In… Read More
HAPPY NEW YEAR!! 🎉🎉🎉 I look at the first few days back with my students as a “soft-start” and here are some of the things we do during that first week! We all need time to get back into the routine, me included! I’ve got a great pack of FREE New Year activities included at the end of this post… Read More
How does a Reward Catalog work? Well, let me show you one of our favorite things in 1st grade! The great news is, you can use a Reward Catalog with any management system that you already have in place, it’s low-maintenance, and it can be low cost and/or FREE for you. Here’s how it works in my room… We use… Read More
I love using spring-themed activities to keep my first grade students engaged during this exciting time of the year! Here is a roundup of some of my favorites that I think you’ll love! Spring-Themed Reading Passages I’ve used these passages for leveled homework, reading groups, and more! Each week has three levels (emerging, growing, established) that cover the same topic… Read More
I love making and sharing great resources for teachers to use. Here is a roundup of some of my FAVORITE FREEBIES from my Teachers Pay Teachers store or my blog! Click the pictures to get your free resources! This pack has 17 passages for first grade Reading Literature (RL) and Reading Informational (RI) passages. Perfect for practice, review, and assessment… Read More
Primary teachers know we have students who come to us writing up a storm and others who are very reluctant to write anything! How do I get my first graders writing from day one? The short answer is…we write ALL THE TIME! (Me included!) We don’t just write at “writing time”. We write on whiteboards, sticky notes, anchor charts, and… Read More
