The Connett Connection

I have a struggling reader.  We have been doing a mixture of phonics and sight words, trying to find how she learns best.  It has been trial and error over the past year, but I think I have finally found a method to help my daughter with learning to read with a whole word approach with sight words.  We still learn phonics, right now working through word families to try and grasp CVC words, but right now, she is excelling in learning sight words, so I want to encourage any growth and excitement about reading that I can. I have begun to introduce 4 sight words a week.  I write all four words on the board on Monday then each day we focus on one word.  We start by me saying all four words.  I then have her repeat the words in order.  We do this two or three times each day.  Then we focus on one word and read sentences with that word in them.  I then have her find and circle every time she sees the focus sight word in the sentences. Here ...

These sight word flip books are designed for teachers and home school parents to be able to piece together resources for their own sight word lists.  There are so many different lists of sight words and a variety of different sequences for teaching the sight words, that I know teachers and home school parents have a hard time finding one resource that includes all the words needed in the order needed.  These flip books seek to help teachers and parents find the words they need easily while not getting activities for words they do not need! These sight word flip books are designed to focus on a single sight word.  Each flip book contains six activities that help students practice sight word recognition, sight word spelling, sight word writing and sight word reading. Find and Color :  Students look for the sight word and color in the sight word. Trace and Write :  The first line, the students trace the sight word and in the next two lines, the...

These sight word packets are designed for teachers and home school parents to be able to piece together resources for their own sight word lists.  There are so many different lists of sight words and a variety of different sequences for teaching the sight words, that I know teachers and home school parents have a hard time finding one resource that includes all the words needed in the order needed.  These packets seek to help teachers and parents find the words they need easily! Each sight word is represented by their own no prep activity packet.  Each packet contains 7 different no-prep for each sight word.  These activities are designed to practice sight word recognition, sight word spelling, sight word writing, sight word reading and sight word fluency. Each sight word packet will contain these color, write and spell pages. These color, draw, write and find pages are one of my daughter's favorites.  She loves word searches and these are perfect f...

Play dough mats are a great hands on way for young children to learn letter, number and sight word recognition.  You may think play dough mats are just a tool children can use play dough on to make the shape of the letters or numbers on the mat.  That is true.  Children use play dough to form the letters, numbers or words on their mat.  This only scratches the surface of ideas to use with these mats!  Now, lets try thinking outside the box for other ways to use these mats in the classroom, other than the standard play dough! One of the simplest, and cleanest, ideas for play dough mats is to simply let the children use their fingers to trace the letters.  By using their hands to trace the letters, numbers or words, they are creating muscle memory to allow them an easier transition to writing later on. Another fun idea is to use classroom manipulatives to cover the mat.  Above we used the circle pieces from our attribute blocks to fill ...

Sickness hits our home again on Monday.  It was a bad morning but thankfully only one kid was sick and no one else succumbed to the illness. My daughter is quite excited about loosing her first tooth.  She does not even have a loose tooth yet, but since her cousin has lost several she is now convinced she will loose one soon.  I had not planned to playing tooth fairy for my kids, but my niece convinced my daughter there is one and she couldn't be more excited about it.  Since she shares a room with her brother, we decided to make a tooth fairy box so I do not have to sneak into her room and risk waking them both up. We started our Valentine themed activities this week.  Above are sight word cards to practice spelling sight words. I was scrolling pinterest looking for some fun crafty activities and my daughter saw this craft and HAD to do it! She begged to complete the fish from pinterest.  I told her if we have all the materials, we co...

We had a pretty light week this week.  My daughter decided to try out the magnet blocks her brother got for Christmas.  They both had fun making shapes, cars, pizzas and trains.  I let them play half the morning with them. My daughter showed me this creation and said, "This is a shape mommy, but I don't know what it is called." We talked about the letter D a little with my 2 year old and made this "D for Dot" craft.   They both loved dotting the q-tip on their letter D paper ! This new activity was by far the highlight of our evening on Wednesday.  I printed a few of these road mat sight words for my daughter drive her little cars on.  She said each letter as she drove the car then said the word as she finished driving on each word. My daughter asked my as I was typing up the " One Hundred Activities for the 100th Day of School " post when she was going to get to celebrate... well we do a number worksheet every morning to practice...

Ever have a day, or week that did not go as planned?  Well this week has been that week!  All of us have been sick.  The older boy started it with a bad ear infection over the weekend.  My daughter started with a headache and soar throat on Tuesday.  I got that from her a few days later.  My husband stayed home on Thursday sick and the baby was diagnosed on Friday with a double ear infection.  So, we did not do nearly as much school as I had planned! Well, now on to our update on what we did do this week in Kindergarten. We continued working on sums up to five.  We did a Lego task card activity, which my daughter loved, to help review what we learned last week.  She built a math problem with her Legos, filled in the number bond and colored in the block strips. We have been learning all about living and non-living things in our science lessons.  We are doing a lot of sorting activities and talking about what makes something a...