Schoolapalooza Day 3

I hope you are all enjoying Schoolapalooza! It’s been a good wake up call me for. School is COMING! I am getting prepared…mentally first. 🙂 To celebrate Day 3 of Schoolapalooza, I made an little word search for your kiddos to use during that first week. This is by no means an amazing teaching tool! However, sometimes you just need to give them a quick, minimal-instruction-required assignment to catch your breath. By “catch your breath, I don’t mean kick up your feet. Ha! I mean do assessments, finish attendance, a morning work activity or whatever! Those little firsties get so tired during that first week. Sometimes they just want to catch their breath. I know we want every minute to be engaging, meaningful and amazing. Don’t worry, I’m sure 99% of your minutes are that way! 🙂 For those in between times, you might need this little worksheet.

I made one with those picture clues and one without.

The inspiration for these was this little guy:

Shawn LOVES word searches!! He first discovered them when we were eating out. Good ol’ kid’s menus. Now every time we go out to eat, Shawn begs me to make him one. I was using crayons and napkins, but then I decided to make some on the computer. Before I knew it, I was totally tricking him into practicing sounding out words. Then he actually remembered one word from the previous time we went out. He remembered seeing “cat” and as he looked for the word again, he was literally going, “/c/- /a/- /t/” like I had last time. Pretty cool, right?! So I thought maybe these can do more than I previously thought.

Here is Shawn working on one in our kitchen early this week. 🙂 These have really helped him realize the concept that words have specific letters in a certain order. He might find a c and get excited that he found “cat”. Then I’ll have him go back to the word and look at the letters. We sound it out together. (I am blending for him right now so he can hear how that works.) Then we go back to the letters in the word search and he then notices that it’s not the same word. So he gets back to searching! I’m actually really surprised at how much these have helped him get letter/sound practice and basic concepts (like that letters make up a word!)

I included those short a word searches that I’ve been doing with Shawn. Each with a border and without (in case the border looks too “busy”). There is also a few with picture clues. Shawn likes the pictures! He also sometimes likes to color the borders if dinner is REALLY taking a long time. He’s not into writing the words…yet! I’m working on it. 🙂

You can get these freebies at my Facebook page.

(I promise tomorrow’s freebie will not be through my Facebook page.) 🙂

I hope you can use these!

Make sure you check out Schoolapalooza at Class-y Collaboration! Each day two bloggers are highlighted with freebies. That’s not all! There is an hour each day where there is a product that you can snag for free! Then at the end of the week, all of these products will come together for a big giveaway.

Thanks to Brenda at Primary Inspired and Kathy Law at First Grade a la Carte for all of their hard work! These ladies are amazing!

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