(Short) Vowel Fun for Everyone!

Happy Labor Day!  We spent our day doing a whole bunch of nothing.  I love those kind of days.  Mr. Spouse had to go in for a few hours today and the boys and I hung out around the house...playing MarioKart Wii...cleaning up...and fighting off a bug that {as Grant said} "surviveth in the water!!!!"  That miraculous water surviving bug was the sole reason they refused to swim this afternoon.  

Oh dear.  

When the boys are home, I have to force them to take a little "down time".  They aren't really big nappers...unless they're in the car...and that's really a shame because I could nap for hours :)  I just like for them to take a little time to "chill"...no technology...no t.v...just some good ol' fashion P.L.A.Y.  

I was finishing up a few things today during their down time and Landon wanted me to go through each page so he could show me what he wanted me to print out.  Play or learn...play or learn.  Hmmmm.  Why not?!  So that's just what they did during their "down time".  They "worked".  And they loved it.  I really do love that they have such a love for learning!!

Looks like we need to work on our problem solving skills :)

The blending boxes were their favorite.  They loved making real and "silly" words.  They liked taking those silly words and using them in sentences.  Let me just tell you that each one of their sentences included the word "fart" in it.  They're in THAT phase.  #boymomexcitement

 

As a first grade teacher, we started out the year learning all about short vowels.  Most of my kids were reading at the beginning of the year and we expanded on their schema with lots of short vowel activities.  We broke those down into "chunks" and would use those as the basis for our weekly spelling tests.  

In Kindergarten, I introduced the concept of vowels as soon as I introduced the letter A which was pretty much the 2nd week of school.  Y'all might remember this fun little song I made up last year.  Boy did this stick all year long!  We sang it every.single.time we talked about vowels.  

We started really working with short vowels and word families after winter break...right around the mid year mark.  That's when we got into CVC practice and they really went to town with that!

When I was planning ahead and thinking about working with my K/1 intervention kids, I wanted to have something that would be good for both ability levels.  Challenging and remedial at the same time.  I spent a little time creating these fun, hands-on activities to use with those kids to give them repeated exposure and multiple opportunities to work with those sounds.  

I'm excited to share this with the teachers I've been working with and to use it with the intervention kids, too!  My boys loved what they worked on today, so I hope that carries over to the other kids, too!  

I added all of my short vowel packets to my store today and, by request, I bundled them as well.  

Click on the pics for a detail preview of what's included in each...