Word Families!

To introduce the idea of word families I used a few different activities.  I had a small magnetic board that I held on my lap.  On the front I put an A and a T magnet.  On the back where the children could not see them I put the letters C, H, S, P, M, B.   Then I got out my puppet Sally Snail who talks very slowly.

 

Sally read the word AT in a slow voice.  Then I put the letter C on the board – with a good space between the C and the AT.  Slowly I moved them together and Sally would read the sounds:  /c/     /at/,   /c/  /at/,  /c/ /at/ – until finally she stretched it out /cat/.    Sally would be excited that she made a new word.

I took off the C and put on a B, then repeated pushing them together.  The children started joining in right away – “helping” Sally figure out the word.

After going through a bunch of AT words I put Sally away – or I did the next activity at another time.  I covered the front of the magnet board with a blanket from our play house (of course anything would do!)  Then I told the children that I was going to do a magic trick for them.  With a big flourish I pulled the blanket away and usually some children read the word AT right away – if not I would read it.  Then I quickly covered it up again and told the children I would magically change the word AT to a new word.  I covered the board again and added a consonant to the beginning – then I had the children tell me a magic word – pulled it off and read the new word.   I could do this quickly because the children had already seen these words when Sally was pushing the letters together.

I repeated changing the letters behind the blanket – saying a magic word – then quickly showing the new word.  The kids loved this!  If I left out the materials they loved playing it themselves during centers too.  Sometimes I added a “challenge” word – that added 2 letters to the front of the word – flat, that, etc.  That offered more of a challenge to higher readers too.

Sometimes I did a similar activity by writing the words on a wipe off board.  When you make a game of it the children really engaged.

 

I also loved using a song called Family Rhyme I found on a Dr. Jean CD that used the tune of The Addams Family!  I usually sang it without the CD.  Here are the words:

Tune – Addams Family

 

Family rhyme, (snap, snap)   family rhyme (snap, snap)

Family rhyme, family rhyme, family rhyme!

 

There’s bat and there’s cat

There’s fat and there’s hat

There’s mat and there’s pat

The AT family

 

There’s bar and there’s car

There’s far and there’s jar

There’s star and there’s tar

The AR family.

 

There’s dog and there’s fog

There’s hog and there’s jog

There’s log and there’s frog

The OG family

 

There’s can and there’s fan

There’s pan and there’s man

There’s ran and there’s tan

The AN family.

 

Here is a printable version of the words:

Family time song

Sorry I typed Family time instead of Family rhyme – who knows why but after I imported it I couldn’t change it!

To play along with the “family” idea I made a simple house shape

house

I put the AT in the triangle at the top, and listed the at words inside the rectangle.

at

I laminated these ‘family houses’ and put them in a 3 ring binder.  I used a pointer and we sang the Family Rhyme song as we read these words.  The children had access to this binder and pointers during free choice too!

Here are some more of the family houses.

ake

an

ar

eep

ike

ing

ook

op

I know there are many more word families – I hope you have fun with them!

Nursery Rhyme Projects

Hey!  I finally posted a copy of the Nursery Rhyme book that several people have been asking about!  You can find it under the Rhyming section, at the end of the blog I first wrote to tell about it.  Sorry it took me so long!

I love sharing Nursery Rhymes with children.  I am starting to repeat them and read them to my grandson, Owen.  I have a few little toys that I use to act them out for him.  In my classroom we acted out most of them because I think that’s a great way to help children remember them.  We also made projects to go along with a lot of the rhymes when I was teaching Kindergarten.

I did not save many of my files when I retired, but when I borrowed back the book I used to reinforce Nursery Rhymes from a friend I taught with (Thank you Laura!) she had several of the projects I used to do with kids in the same file.

For Mary Had a Little Lamb I took a 9 x 12 piece of paper and folded it in 3rds, the tall way.  Then I stapled or taped it like a tent.  The children decorated and cut out a lamb head and body.  They glued them onto the front of the little tent, on the back they glued the poem.  The third side was on the bottom.  We punched a hole near one top corner and attached a piece of yarn.  The children could walk and pull the lamb behind them.  I especially loved making projects that the kids could play with!  Here are the patterns for the lamb:

Mary Had Little Lamb

It was fun to make a Humpty Dumpty that could actually ‘fall off the wall.’  The children traced and cut out a large oval from a 9 x 6 piece of white paper.  Then they tore red paper into ‘bricks,’ and glued them onto a 9 x 6 piece of black paper.  Tearing paper is such a great activity to develop fine motor strength and control.  They used a brad fastener to hold Humpty onto the top of the wall.  As they recited the story they could turn Humpty upside down.  We glued a copy of the poem on the back.    We often cooked scrambled eggs to go along with this project!

For several of the poems we made little booklets they could decorate to reinforce the rhyme.

Here is Little Boy Blue.

Little Boy Blue

I would copy these pages back to back and fold them in half.  I had clipart of  a cow, a sheep, a horn and a haystack.  The children colored them and glued them onto the right page.  They taped the haystack so they could lift it up and see the boy sleeping under it.  (Sorry, my friend didn’t have copies of the clipart but it would be easy to find – or have the children draw!)

The Old Mother Hubbard book was similar.

Old Mother Hubbard

The children folded a piece of tan or brown paper for a cupboard, then drew what might have been inside the cupboard if she didn’t have food (spiderwebs, empty boxes, etc.)  Then they drew or added clipart pictures to finish the rhyme.

Hey Diddle Diddle was a smaller fold up – it ended up being 1/4 page size.  The idea was the same though.  I found when the children made a little booklet like this it really helped them to remember and recite the rhyme.

Hey Diddle Diddle

I hope you have fun with these rhymes with your class too!

Nursery Rhymes

In our district, Nursery Rhymes are considered an important form of literature and it has been part of the Kindergarten curriculum for a long time.  It is amazing to see how many children are totally unfamiliar with these rhymes.  I used to concentrate on these rhymes during December, and the children “performed” them during our Holiday program.  My class did several performances for the parents during the year – my goal was for them to feel comfortable in front of an audience, and to have fun with it.  I think it is also a wonderful form of PR – parents love seeing their children perform, and it is an opportunity to do some parent education – which is also a big part of kindergarten.

I used some resources that made Nursery Rhymes more fun as well as more exciting as a presentation.

This Bruce Lansky book gave a silly version of many common Nursery Rhymes.  I love to encourage the children to play with language and have fun changing books and text.  This book was an easy way to re-do rhymes:

For example:  ”Little Boy Blue, STOP blowing your horn.  You’ll wake up the neighbors, it’s 2 in the morn!”

So my Kindergartners learned the standard rhyme and the silly rhyme.  I have learned that children are much more comfortable performing in front of a group if they have motions to do, so I added ASL signs to the standard rhymes.  I used sign language often because it presented a new challenge to children who were already familiar with skills, provided opportunities for increasing fine motor dexterity, and most of all made children comfortable when they see people using sign language in our community.  I am not skilled in sign language but a simple sign language book allowed me to add signs for important words in each rhyme and made it more fun to perform and watch.

Here are the sign language books I used a lot:

I loved teaching the sign language alphabet also – and the kids loved it too!

Another skill I wanted to work on with the children at this point in the year was writing their name using lower case letters.  At the beginning of the year I was delighted if they could write their name so I could decipher it, but by this point I wanted to help them write it conventionally beginning with a capital letter and the rest lower case.  I got a coloring book of nursery rhymes and used white out on the face of the character for each rhyme.  I photocopied the faces of my class and cut them out.  We changed the rhymes again to use our own names in each rhyme.  For example:  Megan had a little lamb …

On the blanks where they filled in their own names they needed to write it using lower case letters.  I made a name card using a teacher type font on my computer that was kept in a pocket on the cover of the book.  By the end of this book – which took several weeks, most children were comfortable writing their name with lower case letters.

Of course the children added color to their pages, but the emphasis was really on having fun changing the rhyme, and working on writing their name neatly.  We also did a craft for many of the rhymes and put them up to decorate the room.  I liked doing this during December, especially if I was de-emphasizing the holidays, depending on the make up of my class.

 

Here is a link to download the blank pages of this book:

Nursery Rhyme book

See You Later, Alligator

Lots of children come to Kindergarten already able to hear words that sound alike, but there are some children who struggle with many aspects of phonemic awareness.  I use a puppet, because they are my favorite teaching tools, to reinforce rhyming and try to help all children become successful.  I named this guy Sam the Lamb,

And when he comes to the classroom to visit he brings his ‘rhyme chime,’ which is a little metal xylophone.  Every time Sam hears rhyming words he rings the chime.  When I am using Sam I try to use simple rhymes that are close together, and then reinforce the matching sounds with the chime. I found a trade book titled See You Later, Alligator that I read to the class – but you really could just read the book that I made as a followup.  The original book was not really a pattern – some pages said “see you with…,” other pages said “see you on…” and some said “see you at…”

In my remake I used the same sentence for each page “see you with …”   I also introduced the word ‘with’ as a sight word at that time.  The reason I loved this book was that the 2 rhyming words are right next to each other, which makes them very easy to hear.  ”See you with a truck, duck.” After reading and using the rhyme chime several times, I sometimes allowed children to ring the chime for Sam the Lamb when they heard the rhyme.  The book I gave the children already had an animal on each page – we had read the rhymes several times.  I gave them a sheet with the rhyming objects – some they just had to draw.  But I liked this activity much more than a ditto matching rhyming objects because the product was a book they could read and reread.

Please click on this link for a blank copy of this book, and the rhyming objects.

See you later