School and the City

A vowel intensive drill is the perfect way to open a small group lesson for students struggling with phonological awareness. Benefits include strengthening awareness of medial sounds, vowel sounds, and phoneme-grapheme correspondences.  How It Works: Each student gets a set of vowel tents. You can give them all of the vowels at once, or you can give 2 or 3 at a time. (When I first start this with students, I only give them a couple to teach the routine and scaffold as needed.) You, the teacher, will need a word list. I get my word lists from iReady or my favorite GoPhonics Word List Book.  You will say a word, students will repeat it, then they will hold up the tent that represents the vowel sound within the word.  For example… Teacher: “Say ‘bug’” Students: “bug” Students: hold up U tent Students: “U spells /u/” Keep repeating this process until your students become more fluent! Gradually make the words a bit more challenging...

I have virtual class meetings with my students twice a week. They are not academic - purely for social and community purposes. I give each meeting a theme to give us some structure and something to do! ⁣ Here are the themes I've tried: Would You Rather I prepared a bunch of Would You Rather questions which turned into a whole bunch of silly discussions! Show and Tell Students brought something to show and tell the class about. Many brought pets, of course! Pop a Joke I asked students to bring a joke or a riddle to share with the class. Pro tip: Just stick with jokes... some of the riddles students brought were super long, super confusing, or borderline inappropriate. Jokes are a win-win! Keep the Quote Students were asked to bring an inspirational quote to share during the meeting. ⁣ Before the meeting started, I got nervous that students wouldn’t be prepared to share quotes and that we’d sit there staring at each other with nothing to d...