Station Inspiration

See You There!

Blending CVC words

What a great way to get your students sounding out words! 

 Mrs. Randolph has shared this idea with me. She uses three battery operated night lights to push as students sound out CVC words. As a student says the beginning sound, they hit the first light. The second light is for the middle sound, and the last light gets turned on with the ending sound is said. When all lights are on, the student blends the sounds together to make a word.  

This would make a great literacy station. Just throw a few words onto a ring, and student can flip through them to work on blending letter sounds, or even playing to create their own words. 

You can also set up three buckets or jars for student to pick a beginning, middle, and ending sound. Then, use the same concept as above. This gives students the opportunity to generate their own words begetter the words are made up or not, your class will be well on their way to reading.  

Check out this center in action:

Do you have any other great literacy idea? Share them with me so I can highlight them on my blog. 

Hands on Inferring Games

Because students inference all the time, the next thing to do when teaching inference is to tell them that they are already experts at this strategy.  One way you can do this is with a few hands on games: 

 “Who’s Bag Is This?”

A teacher friend of mine would always teacher inferring by bring a few old bags from home and filling them with miscellaneous things.  You may have your students guess where this mystery person is about to go, or maybe even guess what they owner of the bags profession is.  Not only will they have to make the right assumption, but students need to also be able to tell why they inferred the way they did.

“Me” Bags

The teachers can model a “me bag” for her students.  I filled my bag up with items such as running shoes, a metal, a marathon sticker, and a bottle of Gatorade.  Then, I had students infer something about me.  You can do this as an activity and follow it up by having all students bring a “me bag” to share with the class.

Jigsaw An Inference

This something even lower grade students can do. …

Find a few pictures of animals or objects, and cut them up into a handful of pieces.  Students can take turns revealing one piece of the picture until they are able to conclude what the picture is.  Students can play against each other and whoever guesses their picture in the least amount of pieces is the winner.  You can even cut the picture into even smaller pieces and have students roll a die to tell them how many small pieces to get for each turn. 

Context Clues and Inferring

After being so hands on with inferring your students will have a firm understanding of what it is.  At this point, it is important to show them how to infer meanings of words within a text.  Therefore, students must use context clues.  The main thing for students to be successful in this area is to give them “word Power”.  I define word power as using words or parts of words you know, to help you figure out tricky words you may be unsure of.  This means, students need to have a firm knowledge of prefix and suffixes, they should be exposed to lots of base words.   For example Beautiful is easy to understand if you know the word beauty and the definition of the suffix –ful.  

This is by far the hardest part of inferring for students to do.  There are many resources on the web that have printable context clue cards to practice this skill.  One example can be found HERE.

Peek Into Another Classroom

Time is precious...and as a teacher there seems to never be enough of it to get the job done!  One thing I always wished I had the opportunity to do as a teacher was visit my colleagues classrooms.  If I had the opportunity to see what amazing things they were doing with their students, it may have made me a stronger teacher.  I may have found ways to make my job easier by studying what other teachers on campus did well.
I am hoping that this blog gives you an opportunity to take a peek into other teachers classrooms at your own convenience.  If you feel that you do something well, please let us know.  I am willing to come to your classroom and take pictures or even video tape you so that your colleagues can see how awesome you are at your profession.