Bright Ideas Blog Hop ~ Helper of the Day ( while teaching beginning sounds )

Honestly there’s not much better than to be doing a daily routine while getting in some academic work…it’s kinda like sneaking in vegetables to a kid’s meal! It makes me happy, very happy! So how do I do that you ask??? It’s simple and you could start it tomorrow yourself. Take a manila envelope and cut off the flap.

Next…tape the side you just cut the flap from and seal it and then using an exacto knife cut the opposite side to use as the opening.

This is the side you will be pulling from. Use sentence strips to write your students names on – 1 for each student.

Then place all the strips with your student names into the manila envelope and you are all set…

So as you can see, I have just pulled out the first letter on the strip. All the kids in my class that have the letter R at the beginning of their name stand up. I use this opportunity to have the kids say what sound ‘r’ makes as well…Then I slowly pull it out to expose the 2nd letter if it is an o and I have a child named Rylee she would sit down and the kids with an Ro would stay standing…then the next letter would be exposed, etc. For these pictures my students names were Rowan and Rowanne so you can see the 2 kids would stand up until the second n popped up. This is great for several reasons…one each day it is motivating to see who the helper is as they all love to be the helper of the day…secondly it’s a great reinforcer for letter recognition and it keeps their attention.

As you can see it says Rowan – Rowan is still standing but so is Rowanne waiting to see if the sentence strip is pulled out and done or there are more letters….

They are both still standing – obviously some days it’s much simpler for instance if I had a Vicky – there would probably be only one student that started with a V and everyone would know it was Vicky but each day they are very excited to see what the first letter is and who gets to stand up and for how long…try it out – it’s fun and quick prep to get it going in your room. Check out all the wonderful teacher ideas for this blog hop and add them to your ‘bag of tricks’…let me know how it goes and…Happy Teaching!