Sawyer Update and Word Family Fun! (HUGE freebie!)

Sorry for the long absence, friends.  As many of you know, my daughter (now 3 months old) was diagnosed in-utero with a rare heart defect.  We had her first open heart surgery at 7 days old and have recently returned to the hospital (2.5 months later) for severe complications.  My little girl went into cardiac arrest, received 27 minutes of chest compressions, and was placed on emergency ECMO.  She is off ECMO now and recovering.  She also has endocarditis (an infection on the heart) that we are treating with antibiotics. My family so appreciates any thoughts and prayers you would be willing to offer.

The hospital is not the most happening place, so I've had lots of time to work on classroom goodies.  I love teaching word families so I thought that would be a nice, big project to tackle!  Check out some of the goodies I made for teaching whole group, small group, and independent practice! 

Everything I ever teach, I introduce whole group.  Teaching word families is no different!  We have a song that we sing for each word family using the word/picture cards.  We also make a flipchart for making word family words with onset/rime.  My kids LOVE shared writing, so I made some sight word sentences where kiddos can fill in the blanks with word family words! 

After we've gone over everything whole group, kids are ready to work with these words in stations and with you during guided reading!  Stations include Write the Room and Onset/Rime Puzzles.  There is a Word Family Slider Craftivity for kids to practice making and reading word family words.  I like to play the Grab It/Dab It game during Guided Reading.  Students reach into a bag and pull out a picture or word card.  If they pull a picture, the whole group uses bingo dabbers to dab that word on their sheet.  If they pull a word, they dab the corresponding picture.  SO FUN! 

I like using printables to reinforce concepts either as morning work or homework.  These printables are no-prep so they are teacher-friendly but they also provide great practice for your kiddos.  I also included an emergent reader.  My kids L-O-V-E these... honestly.  We read the word family readers together, then I pass out highlighters.  The kids go back through the story and highlight all the word family words.  Then they write them on the lines on the last page.  I have no idea why they love this so much, but there is something about highlighters -- They are great motivators! 

There ya have it!  So far I've done the Short A families - Ag, Ad, An, Am, At, and Ap.  You can grab all 43 pages of the AT pack for FREEEEEEEEE! The rest of them are set up the same way.

Check out the whole bundle for a discount by clicking below! :) 

Word Family Sets and Bundles for all the other vowels coming SOON! :)