Short Vowel Practice

I went into my classroom yesterday to clean up the Christmas aftermath and start getting ready for Tuesday. I pulled down my January box and started getting excited. I have one of these Rubbermaid boxes for each month of the year.

It holds all my big tracers, packets of extra copies that didn't get used, examples of crafts, center activities, and other random things like stamps or foam stickers or other themed materials. As I pass each year there are more things waiting for me in these boxes that are already prepped and ready to go haha. It's a great feeling. We are going to be doing lots of fun winter activities for the first few weeks of January with lots of snowmen, hot cocoa, and winter clothes. It should be quite the learning experience since we are living in sunny Florida haha!






Before break we were doing a lot of work with hearing the short vowel sounds in the middle of words. One of our favorite songs to sing is our short vowel song. I have no idea where this idea came from but my kids love it. I taught them the sign language hand signs for each of the vowels. I've noticed that really helps them remember the sounds. Then I have them put both hands behind their backs and I call out a vowel and they make the sign with their hands. Then we sing the song (to the tune of "Where is Thumpkin?")  "Where is short a? Where is short a? Here I am! Here I am! /a/ /a/ /a/ /a/,  /a/ /a/ /a/ /a/, Run away! Run away!"  My kids would sing this all day if I let them. We sing through all 5 sounds like that.

This week we are going to focus more on the short o sound and connect it to hot chocolate. I made a big mug for sorting vowel sounds. This picture is from last year's mug...sorry there's a glare (my classroom lights are so bright!)

We sort the marshmallows whole group and put the "o" words in the hot chocolate. Then the students get their own mug to decorate and a page of marshmallows to sort.

You can find this activity in my store here.

Have a great rest of the weekend friends!!