I love anchor charts!

   Teachers and students love anchor charts!  I love anchor charts and use them for everything! They are amazing for reading and writing to remind students of routines, procedures, and important information they should remember. They are also great in math for helping students remember different strategies and concepts. Anchor charts are helpful in the primary grades because it can be difficult for students to remember several steps in a process. Being able to reference anchor charts around the room really helps to continuously reinforce the content that has been taught.
    I personally love making anchor charts because I like creating the pictures and attempting to write in a nice font.  I always say I have the handwriting of a 5th grade boy, so the writing part takes major focus.  Anchor charts are a wonderful interactive activity that students should be engaged in.  My students always share what pictures they want to see, or they contribute to the pictures as well.  Here are some anchor charts for reading that we have hanging from a clothesline in our classroom.

The kiddos picked their favorite storybook characters to be included on this anchor chart which helps to make it more memorable.

*Have fun with anchor charts!  They don't have to be a masterpiece, just effective.
*Add book covers, photographs and other familiar items that might spark the kids interest and help them remember the concept.

 *If you can't add all of your content onto one chart, keep adding on to one and then tape the next one to the bottom, or hang them next to each other.

I could plaster my classroom walls with anchor charts, but after awhile too many will look cluttered and lose their effectiveness.  When we move onto a new topic I like to hang smaller anchor charts, or put them in centers for students to reference.  

Do you love anchor charts as much as me?  What do you use them for?

Fiction and Nonfiction Bulletin Board!

Oh, bulletin boards...a love/hate relationship.  I love doing bulletin boards, but sometimes things get so hectic it becomes tough to change them every month.  With that being said, I am pretty lucky because I don't have an actual bulletin board, I have these metal strips that hold student work.  It's nice because when I don't have time to get real creative, I can just slip some recent student work into the strips.  The part that stinks, is that when I want to do something fun and festive I have to get out 20 pounds of sticky-tac and adhere everything to the wall.  This month we have been really focusing on identifying fiction and nonfiction.  This is a tough concept, but we have been having a lot of fun learning with songs, center activities and much more.  We decided to showcase some of this work in the hallway with the help of a few snowy friends.  Sorry the pictures are a bit blurry, but you get the idea :)

My son is obsessed with Frozen and I haven't been able to get the songs out of my head all week!  "Do you want to build a snowman?"  My students love the movie as well so I just had to find a way to get Olaf up on that wall.  I love hearing the kids freak out when they walk by him in the hallway, I even caught a little girl hugging the wall yesterday haha.  So cute!

The student work displayed consists of various pages from our nonfiction retelling books and a sorting page for pictures of books we cut out of Scholastic Book Club magazines.  You can check out these products for more fiction and nonfiction fun!

Soapy Sight Word Fun

I am totally in love with word work this year!  I have always enjoyed it, but this year I am trying extra hard to make every day totally hands-on and loads of fun.  One activity that my students and I love is creating our sight words in shaving cream!  It is super fun, the kids get a ton of kinesthetic practice with their sight words and our desks look sparkling clean afterwords.

Just a few tips before your begin:
- Use unscented shaving cream, unless you want your room to smell like a men's locker room for a week.
- Have students roll up their sleeves, they will get messy :)  Good thing it is just soap and it will come right off, and usually fades by the end of the day.
- When finished, have students rub the shaving cream around until it disappears and then use baby wipes to clean off any residue.

        I usually start by prompting the kids with phrases similar to "write a sight word that starts with an L and rhymes with bike" or "write be, now erase the b and make it an m, what word do you have now?"  You can make up any fun riddles that you would like.  I also like to have them race to write the entire word wall from A to Z and write and share their favorite words with their friends.  The kids love getting messy and playing with their words, and so do I!

What is your favorite word work activity?