Hurry and check this out if you use The Open Court Reading Program

Do you have the Winter Blues right now? I am offering a little freebie for all my Open Court buddies. It looks like this. I use this game with my class all the time and they love it. I gave you all the directions. You can hug me later. Yup we are still hammering teaching beginning sounds to a few of my strugglers but the others just enjoy the activity. You can have students do it with a partner or just work on it independently. You are the boss and get to decide!

Open Court is a reading program that has been around for a long time. Our district continues to use it and based on my Facebook fans many of them are also using it. I create many things to scaffold this program for my English language learners and I decided to post a collaborative activity (yes you need to be using this model if you are implementing Common Core). So long story short I posted a super freebie that you will want to grab if you can use it...
How do I get the freebie?

Click on the icon for Kindergarten Crayons and it will take you right to my FB page. Easy, right? Even I can figure this out!
Are you there? Okay now "like" my page at the top. Got it? Awesome. Stay with me here. One more step so don't wimp out on me. See the button on the left side that says Fan Freebie? Hit it and download this 24 page file. Yup leave a comment so I know you got it. Thanks. Now you are my FB friend and you will see other cool stuff along the way.

                                                                       

Cutting Paper Not Hair Or Clothing!

Do you have those students in your classroom that I refer to as "scissor happy"? I do. They love to cut anything in sight and I need to pay attention or disaster is right around the corner. When my students get tired of cutting out pictures, they start making confetti. That means they are not on the lines I have for them to follow and they just want to get the project over with! Who is on my page? So when I decided to make them a Letters and Sounds book I really tried to keep it simple but effective. Here is what I can up with:

 This is quick and easy but I think it will still be effective. We have been using Open Court for about 12 years and I am amazed that this never dawned on me before. I want to keep this in the classroom as a resource that kids can use when writing or doing other related activities. That is what Common Core is suggesting we do and it makes sense to me!

When we are working on letters and sounds I can pick and choose which pages I want to do. I am running these off 2 at a time and will save so much paper this way. I think this might be more fun for a little kinder person that writing and gluing a whole page. I will let you know if it is effective or not.