Summer Lovin

Sorry I haven't posted for so long.  I haven't been doing anything special, just really lovin our Summer break. I think I'll need all the R&R because once we go back I'll be stressing. Why? Because we only have 2 DAYS to set up our classrooms. Yep, we all had to hand in our keys before we left and we only get them back on the Monday, 2 days before we have to return to school for teacher days (Wed thru Friday). And the 'planning time', which is always 'get room set-up time' is always just the last hour of the day BUT we are expected to have our rooms 'student ready' on Friday morning as kiddos and their parents drop off their things then. 

Anywho, since I'm not at school I don't have anything really to post about. I did make up these READ things that everyone has now. I want to hot glue some thin black ribbon around the outside still.

I've also started making some Word Family packs to work on with my new firsties. I'm making the 'a' word families in pink (so I can mix them up later for review) and the other vowels in a different color.

Each pack has 11 activities and centers and about 50 pages of word family fun! Here's what I've printed and have ready. 

We'll be using magnets to make words in the first pic. The first set of cards students will just need to add the beginning sound or blend. In the second set, students will need to make the whole word. We'll also make flip books and word slides. The color copies I've made up to work on word families during guided reading and I've also included B&W copies for students to make, color and keep for themselves (I've only printed off the B&W flip book). 

The second pic here shows the self-correcting -at Word Family puzzles. The kids are going to love them! The first pic shows just about everything. I've included some flash cards/word wall cards, Roll and Write graph, letters to make words at the pocket chart, a play-doh mat, a word family min-book, a Fill in the Blank cloze worksheet and word search.

I'm working on other packs at the moment. I've got a list a mile long of things I want to work on to save time during the school term but I don't think most of them will happen!

If you're in the southern hemisphere, how is your break going?