Light Up Your World With Hanukkah

This is a new product that I am really excited to present to you. I spent a long time on it since I wanted emergent readers that provided information about the holiday of Hanukkah. I think I pulled it off and I am really happy that it is Common Core aligned. The first book is entitled Hanukkah is Here.

It is important to me that my students be exposed to culturally diverse literature and these books provide them with that opportunity. They will also build academic vocabulary while they practice important foundational skills. The teacher reader is perfect for a literacy station once students have completed their own version. 

The second set of books are for building math concepts and the title is Light the Menorah. Teachers will have a colored version to read to their students and to use as a model during small group instruction. Students work on counting skills, ordinal numbers, and reading number words. This can be challenging for young children but this book contextualizes these numbers so children can make sense of this. 

Are these only useful at this time of the year? No! These have valuable content that children can explore throughout the year. If you want to take a peek at them you will find them here.  Have a wonderful week.

No More Simple Readers... Meet the Challenge!

I hope you have been adding some sparkle to your reading program and now is the time to step it up and bit.

March is here and the year is sliding by. Is it just me or did this happen quick as a snap? Here are some readers that can be used with any program to enhance your small and large group instruction. 

So as I move around my district as a Common Core teacher I have been in many kindergarten classrooms asking them what emergent readers they would like to have. These are four new Sparkle Readers I have created just for them. I have a balance of fiction and non fiction so that our children are building crucial academic vocabulary and knowledge which is age appropriate. These can be found in my TpT store and have sentence builders to go in the pocket chart. Each book has a sentence with a focus on "I like" and then a second one with a repetitive piece. There are a variety of activities provided to keep your students engaged such as word writing, counting by 10's, cut and paste, and working with transition words. Why do I have two lines? Common Core tells us that our children need to build stamina and be challenged! I am taking it up a notch and with repetitive text my ELL's will work on wrapping around which is crucial for first grade. It is March and I need to get them on the path to becoming first graders! No more little foldables... on to the real work of learning to read. Dots are provided to help children track these words as they sweep around the text. Are you up for the challenge? Check them out here!

Another Look At Martin Luther King

Check out these readers I have created to celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday. After reading some of the books that are readily available this makes a nice follow up for students to read. The focus is on the goals students can set for the new year. I have not used these in my classroom but I am definitely going to try it out in the coming week. This is such a nice way to encourage students to set goals for themselves and work hard just like Dr. King. One page has an empty frame which allows students to draw something they hope to accomplish by the end of the year. This is in Teachers Notebook for now because I am having trouble with TpT. I will keep trying and hopefully it will show me some love and upload later. So what is your dream?
Click on Dr. King to purchase these for just $4.00.

            

Add Some Sparkle to Your November: You Need It

Add some sparkle to your November

These are back by popular demand and I think they will be great for kindergarten teachers and intervention specialists.. I worked hard on these to make them "just right" for this time of the year and then I tested them out in a variety of classrooms to make sure they were a good fit. The kids loved the topics and gave me a thumbs up! I love praise from five year olds. So here is the November set and remember that each book comes with its own sentence builders for your pocket chart. Build them and use sticky dots under the text.
All 80 pages are available in my TpT store for you to grab if this will make the crazy month of November a little easier. Gobble, Gobble  this here.

Fall Sparkle Has Arrived

So my life is all about Common Core and I have created four little emergent readers for this time of the year that your students should enjoy. No matter what, I am sure they will all like the Halloween one the best since our students love to dress up in costumes.  I have some non fiction readers that are science based and a fire safety reader has also been included. Anything missing? I hope not. Need some sparkle after all the testing and progress reports? Doesn't that seems to rear its ugly head five seconds after school has started? If you are interested they will be available in my store at Teachers Pay Teachers and I will try to get them up soon at Teachers Notebook. Have a great week of teaching!
Who is doing backward planning and is using Big Ideas and Essential Questions? I have some great ideas for that spinning  around in my head. We are hitting that hard right now!

Do You Need Some Sparkle In Your Life?

So I started to think about what has been missing from my core reading program that would make teaching our youngest learners more effectively. With that in mind I also wanted it to align to the new CCSS so it can be used in the future. Our program marches through the sight words like a ball of fire so I decided to change that up a little. I  created four different readers using the sight word "the". In addition to this, I wanted students to practice coloring, tracing, cutting and pasting to build their fine motor skills.  It is also important to build academic language and address the needs of English language learners. In this packet I included sentence strips so that students can practice the language of these emergent readers in a pocket chart to build their confidence and print awareness. Sticky dots can be used under each word so they can track the text. These four readers cross a variety of content areas too. I think this is a great tool for a kindergarten teacher who does not want to race through her program and would like to build capacity while aligning to the CC. Whew! This was way too cognitive. I need to take a nap!

Do you need this? I think this is ideal for Transitional Kindergarten. I better print some of these for my TK buddies. Click on this picture to get to my TpT store. Have a fantastic Sunday.