With help from my friend Maile, I've been doing some structured word work with Finley. We're using Words Their Way to teach word families. So far Finley has learned to spell the words in the -AT word family (cat, hat, rat, bat, sat, mat, pat, fat). We are also working on -AD (Dad, Sad, Mad, Pad). Maile has been great in getting me started on a good schedule with Finley for word work. She made this little checklist that we've hung in Finley's word work area to help keep us on track. The first word family took us about 2 weeks to complete (we didn't do it everyday). On average we will spend 1-2 weeks per word family.
Here is Finley's word work area. I hang her words in the pocket chart, we have our checklist, and a bulletin board to display work. I've also taped some work to the wall. We have our magnetic letters in a fishing bait box (thanks again Maile), a cookie tray, pencils, our Melissa & Doug stamps, her journal, and a folder with work to be completed.
When we started out, I made a bubble map with our last name in the middle. And then we talked about how we belonged to the same family because we all had the last name. Even though we had different first names, our last names were the same. Just like in word families, the beginning sound is different but the ending is the same. This obviously wouldn't work for every family (some families have different last names) but it was a concrete way for me to teach Finley the basic of word families.
After our "Davis Family" bubble map, we did an "-AT Family" bubble map. Finley did great at this!
Here is some of her practice with the words. The top sheet is where she glued the word, stamped it in uppercase and lowercase, glued the matching picture, and then wrote the word. Then I wrote the words randomly on a piece of paper and had her circle the word as I said it. Good practice recognizing the word and fine motor practice (circling the word). Then I wrote a column with the words in all uppercase and another column with the words in lowercase and had her match them. We probably won't do this particular activity with each word family, I just wanted to give her some more exposure to the words.
Building her words. She loves doing this!
This was a roll and graph game Maile sent to me. I wrote the words on a cube and she rolled it and then graphed which word it landed on.
We have a few sets of Bob Books and she loves that she can read these simple books. This one had most of our words in it and she was so excited to really read them!
This was her "spelling test." After all our fun with the words I had her spell the words orally and then write them down. Later I wrote down the words she spelled in marker just for my reference. I couldn't believe how easy all of these activities were. Just a few minutes here and there and I've got a 3 year old who is spelling and writing (other than just her name)! Crazy! She has been crazy in love with the fact that she can spell. She has been using stickers to spell out her words during free play, writing them on the white board at church, spelling them out with the magnets on the fridge, and pointing them out in books.
