First Grade Grammar Activities & Printables

When do you teach the grammar and language standards in your classroom??

Nouns, determiners, comma usage, prepositions...

Ya know... allllllllllll of THESE!

Some can be easily embedded into your reading or writing block, while others I try to find the time to do whole lessons on!

Even with an extended day (730-330), I can have a hard time fitting ALL these standards in my first grade classroom. I have been finding that that the best time for me to teach these is.... wherever it fits! That probably isn't the answer you were hoping for, but I have found that it works best in room 102.

I can say that when I taught in Las Vegas, I had a 20 minute block to fit these standards in each day and that was fine and dandy, but I would have rather had more time to expand writer's workshop or reader's workshop. I felt like I didn't have enough time to delve deeper into the main subject areas, so I have found that teaching these skills in small groups allows me to personalize the instruction and teach only what my students needed to be taught.

Once I figured out when I wanted to teach these skills, I needed tools to teach them. A little over a year ago I went through each and every first grade Common Core language standard and created anchor charts, activities and printables for them all!

Here are some of the activities included:

 Roll, Spell, and Cover!

I have this game for short vowels, long vowels, and digraphs!

Multiple meaning triangles:

Students match up the multiple meanings of a word to create a triangle.

 Categories:

Students practice vocabulary sorting by determining which category each noun belongs in.

Connect em:

Students make sentences using the conjunctions.

 Inflectional endings flip books:

Students practice reading words with inflectional endings and writing sentences with them.

 List it:

Students pull a card and write a sentence with a list of 3 or more things and correctly add the commas to the sentence.

 Puppy prepositions:

Students practice their prepositions by completing this mini-book and saying where the puppy is on each page.

 Root word, prefix, and suffix anchor charts!

There are TONS of activities and printables 

If you need any activities to teach these standards, you can grab them all in my bundle below:

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Phonics Fun in 1st Grade!

We have been hit by a snowstorm here on the east coast! A good ole 26 inches of snow hit us here in Salem, which meant that it was Theo's first real snowfall!

He was already apprehensive...

and... he was not a fan! He didn't cry... but just sat in the snow with that face for a minute or two lol

While we have been snowed in for the past two days, I thought I would re-do some of my oldest units for some updated phonics fun!

Cover Up game for digraphs! My digraph unit has games, centers, search and find printables for all the following digraphs:

Read and Draw! My long vowels unit has short stories, sorts, and plenty of small group games for all 5 long vowels and their different spelling patterns.

Click above to see more closely what is in the unit!

BINGO! What's more fun that some ole' fashioned bingo! I made game boards for short vowels. long vowels, and blends/digraphs. I love using these on "fun Friday" or during centers. The best part is, students can play themselves without me.

and lastly, I updated my consonant blends unit:

My blends unit also has games, printables, and short stories for students to decode and find s blends, r blends, and l blends.

If you already own any of these or my word work bundle which includes all these units - please go to "my purchases" and re-download.

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Phonics Poetry for Grades K-2!

Do your young learners have poetry journals?! Mine do and we love them. 

The main question I have been asked in the past is what I put inside my journals and I created a resource to help answer that question. Most of the poems in our poetry journals are phonics poems, but I also am sure to include plenty of seasonal and holiday poems throughout the year.

I always had trouble finding poems that were appropriate for my first graders to decode on their own throughout the year, so I used to make up a few of my own. I decided this past year to make lots more, type them up, add some clipart and borders and voila! Here is my newest unit, Phonics Poetry for Grade K-2!

If you want to see how I set up my poetry journals in the class, click the picture below to read my previous post on Blog Hoppin' AND snag one of the poems for free!

Inside my phonics poetry pack, there are 27 different phonics poems that focus on common word families and phonemes taught in Kinder, 1st grade, and the beginning of 2nd grade. Each word family or phoneme has a short, simple poem written by me, a practice page for students to record their words and sort real vs. nonsense words, and there is also a visualization sheet. 

Here is a close up of each:

Poem: the above poem focuses on long vowel e, spelled /ee/. The set up of my poems are very similar so students can get used to them. Students read the poem many different times and ways and then glue it into their poetry journal and color in the picture.

Visualization Page: I find that poetry is the perfect time to teach visualization! Sometimes instead of the full-sized sheets, I will substitute the poem for that week with a visualization sheet. We still read the poem numerous ways and identify the words with the word family or phoneme we are learning that week. Instead of simply coloring in the clip art on the page, I have my students draw what the poem is about! It is a great way for me to see who can actually decode the poem and understand it.

Practice page: This is the page we complete after we read and illustrate our poems. It allows students to record some of the words they found in the poem as well as decode real and nonsense words with that word family/phoneme.

I also included a few sheets on how and when I use these sheets in my classroom:

My kids really love collecting these poems in their journal throughout the year and I allow plenty of time for students to read through their poetry journal. It also makes for quite the keepsake when they leave my classroom in June!

To see more, head over to view my Phonics Poetry unit on TPT and download the preview!

It is also on SALE through tomorrow night!

PS - as the year progresses I plan to add a few more phonemes, word families, and consonant blends to this unit. Feel free to let me know if there are ones you would like added! I just ask that you please be patient with me as THIS is what's going on in my life right about now:

...now THREE more days...

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Free Consonant Blends Game!

After a little phonics screening this past week, I realized a good chunk of my kiddos were STUCK on blends. They were having trouble reading both beginning and ending consonant blends. I created a fun little game which I introduced on Friday and my kids loved it!

Here it is in action:

The premise:

Each student receives a blends spinner. They take turns spinning and their job is to create a real word using their blend and a word ending from the game board. When they find one, they cover it with their color cube! Once all the boxes are covered (which takes quite a while), students count their cubes up and see who has the most! While they are trying to find a real word, they are practicing a bunch of nonsense blend words along the way!

I uploaded the file to googledocs so I thought I would share it for free!

Just click below to grab it:

I am also prepping a bunch of activities from my Tricky Sticky Blends pack to help my struggling readers this week!

Hoping everyone has a great weekend :) I am enjoying this 40 degree weather here in Boston, which believe it or not, feels really, really warm!

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Five for Sunday!

This has been a buuuuusssyyy weekend, which is why I am a wee bit late for my Five for Friday!

Here is my week in snapshots:

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Last Saturday, I met up with a bunch of New England bloggers for some good food and even better conversation! I love meeting other bloggers and these sweet ladies are so close!

From left to right, starting in the back:

Wendy - Ms. D's Literacy Lab

Me!

Deirdre - A Burst of First

Bex - Reading and Writing Redhead

Vera - the Tutu Teacher

Sara - The Colorful Apple

Diane - Hopelessly Devoted to Teaching

Katie - blog "stalker" :)

Furnell - Owl Always Love 2nd Grade

Rae - Mindful Rambles

Sally - Elementary Matters

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 Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, we have an hour long block set aside for centers! I love this because I can group my students accordingly and get to work on those skills they desperately need for a whole, mostly uninterrupted 60 minutes. This week was all about phonics development in my centers.

Roll, Spell, and Cover! Students at this center had to draw upon previously taught spelling patterns and phonemic sounds to spell different short vowel words. I also have this game using long vowel words and digraphs. This game is in my First Grade Common Core Language - Part 2 unit!

Cover up! This center group was working on those tricky digraphs! This unit is SO old and is in the process of a pretty new makeover, but the games work all the same! This center is from my Showstopping Digraphs pack!

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100th day! Our 100th day of school came and went this past Thursday. We had loads of fun, but my students' favorite part of the day was creating their 100th day snack mix!

Each student gets 10 small dixie cups and a variety of snacks! They have to put 10 pieces of the same snack in each cup. Once everyone has filled up their 10 cups, we all count by tens together as we pour the cups into their freezer bag. Throughout the day, I tell my students when they can eat 10 pieces of their snack mix and we subtract that 10 from 100 to determine how many more snacks we have in our bags. A little math, the fun way!

Of course, no 100th day would be complete without the infamous "When I'm 100 years old...." writing prompt. They always crack me up! This little one above was all about using those labels we learned about last week. #proudteacher

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Wedding! The entire Moran-clan headed out to a wedding yesterday and it was a blast! The husband decided to try out a goatee for the first time ever..... (see below).... still debating how the wifey feels about it....

Siblings! I'm the oldest of this crew and I just love them to pieces!

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Last, but not least, it is Super Bowl Sunday all the Blog Hoppin' ladies are throwing a SALE!

For today only, my entire store will be 20% off!

PS - even though my precious Patriots aren't in the game..... I am still going to watch and root for the Seahawks!!

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