Hi everyone! I spent my weekend doing some much needed organizing. I have spent the past three or four years organizing my short vowel materials in plastic gallon zip bags filled with smaller plastic bags. It serviced its purpose. I always knew where to find it. They were all together- short o in a big bag, short a in another… I’d just grab the bag when I needed it and sift through what I wanted. Like I said, it worked. It started to drive me crazy though because I had so many materials and it was getting harder to sift through things. Some things were also getting crunched. Worse of all was when my teacher friends would ask to borrow some materials and I had to politely ask them to close their eyes as I took things out of the baggies. Ha! I was motivated to organize this once and for all when my sweet kindergarten teacher at my school asked to look through some of my things. She is new to our school and she is amazing and wonderful. Of course I want to share! But wait, my stuff isn’t other-teacher-besides-me-user-friendly. Thanks to her, I am now super happily organized. Now she can just grab a binder to look through things and grab what she needs. And I can do the same! I added the binder spine to my short o and I will be adding it to all the other short vowel packs today. I used a 1 1/2 inch binder to fit all this in.
I found these pencil pouches at Fred Meyer for $1!! I bought like 20 of them. Most of my materials can just fit in the regular plastic sleeve protectors, but I use the pencil pouches for some of the materials that took up more space.
In case you are curious, every short vowel pack has pretty much the same materials, which is nice for consistency. You can mix and match or teach separately. I use these hands-on colorful materials with my Printable Phonics Packs. I like to have both options. 🙂 The kids I work with need plenty of opportunities to practice sounding out these words in isolation and in context. I included varying levels of difficulty so you could start with the very beginning readers and move up to kids with experience sounding out words.
(This will link you to the short o pack. In the description, there are links to the other short vowel packs.)
