Happy Bachelor Monday everyone! I’m currently sitting comfortably on the couch watching the Bachelor finale while the pup tries terribly to get my attention and fails. Sorry sweetie, the bachelor is live and supposed to be epic (like every other bachelor finale!) Oh well ABC…you get me every time!
Anyway, today was a busy fun-filled day of learning in room 11! One of our skills this week in phonics is to focus on compound words. I don’t know about you but I LOVE teaching compound words. Every year the kids get it, find joy in searching for compound words in tons of books, and have fun with it. This year, I wanted to make sure that I was engaging my students and getting them moving and interacting with each other while learning about compound words. For this reason, I created my newest packet…Compound Words Birthday Party!
We started off the day with Dr. Jeans’ fun tune, Compound Boogie. My kids love music this year, so this was a great way to start off our day!
After listening to Compound Boogie and brainstorming some compound words with our circle map, we started to orally practice finding compound words in sentences on the SMART board. The kids did a great job with it and love to use our hand motions when sounding out the words. Say one word, put your right hand out, say the second word and put your left hand out, say the word together and clap your hands! After some more practice on the SMART board I knew we were ready for a little interaction. One of my students immediately made the connection of compound words being like a puzzle, with two words having to fit together. It was such a light bulb moment for him and he was so excited that I told him he was reading my teacher mind!! He genuinely thought that I just whipped up these puzzle pieces in the matter of time that he told me his idea…such a sweet first grade moment! Afterwards I knew we were ready to put our compound word puzzles together by finding a partner match!
I handed out a card to each student. When we do these activities, which is very often my kids know to “alligator chomp” the cards between their hands and return to their seats without peaking! Once they were allowed to look, I asked them to think to themselves what possible words could be combined with theirs to make a real compound word. Their ideas were great and reflected an already deep understanding of the concept! On my signal, they get up and start searching around the room to find their compound word match!
Once we had found all of our matches we gathered back together on our carpet and put all of our puzzle pieces together.
After we discussed all of the matches and what we built we were ready for a little paper and pencil practice. We used the words we had built from our partner match and recorded them on our papers. The pictures really helped them understand the two words that made up the compound word. We were quick too to clear up any misconceptions, a compound word is ONLY true if it can be separated into two REAL words!
I’m excited to share the rest of the activities in my packet with my students! Most of the activities will be interactive and an opportunity for students to pair up with each other. Next up we will be working through activities like Find Someone Who, where students will have questions for their friends to answer and initial about compound words.
We will continue throughout the week with more activities like compound word scoot, Pictionary, and more printables and interactive notebook pages! I can’t wait to see what more fun compound words has to offer us!
If you’re interested in these interactive activities, visit my TpT store here and check it out! Here’s to a great week!
3 Comments
Wow, that looked like a great day Jayme! I loved your ideas of teaching compound words and it was great how the kiddos were up and moving. Your students are lucky to have you. Have a great rest of your week! š
Thank you so much Diana! You don't know how much your kind words mean to me! I have an active group this year so movement is a MUST in my classroom! I hope you have a great week too!
I love these ideas!! Is this a first grade standard? I teach second and I see in my state it is a second grade standard? Fingers crossed so I can do it for my observation lesson!