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Author: Emily

Dollar Store Word Work Activities

Do you do Daily 5? It was a total game changer for my daily schedule! You can read more about how I manage Daily 5 here. My students have a few tasks to do every day for the Word Work station of Daily 5.  First, they do their word sort. 

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Christmas Consonant Blends

We’re back again with some adorable Christmas literacy centers. This time we’re tackling consonant blends : s blends, l blends, and r blends. These centers are a fun and seasonal compliment to our phonics program. Word Play Phonics for 1st and 2nd grade is a differentiated word study program that incorporates weekly

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Turkey Digraphs

Isn’t practicing an important concept so much more fun when you can do it with an engaging, seasonal activity? We created this free beginning digraph turkey center as a companion to the phonics program we’ve been working on and we want to share it with all of you! Speaking of our

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One Word Theme for the School Year

Agree or Disagree? September is the new January! For me, this is definitely TRUE. I always feel energized and inspired to start fresh come September, even in the years when I haven’t been teaching. It just feels like a fresh start, a perfect time to set goals and make changes. In

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1 Easy Trick to Simplify Word Sorting

Aren’t we all looking for a way to simplify the management of 25+ students and all their little word sort cards each week? A reader told us this tip a few years ago and we couldn’t believe how simple and easy it was. It’s a CRAYON. Here’s what you do…

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Join Us on Facebook!

We’ve created a fun community for teachers to gather and collaborate on Facebook. We’d love to have you join us. We have some fun things planned including special daily deals for the month of June!  Click here to join the Facebook group. 

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One Giant Leap (Day)!

There’s something just so fun about leap day. I think it must be the novelty of a day that only happens every 4 years and the feeling that you get a bonus day! We wanted to create a day of exciting leap day activities that were still meaningful. We chose

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Easy Class Parties

CLASS PARTY. The words sometimes strike fear in the heart of a teacher, right? As if we don’t already have enough to do, we have to plan a class party too? Oh the chaos! But it turns out it’s possible to put together a simple party, devoid of chaos, that’s

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Halloween Fun: Carving Out Time to Learn

We have a fun new bundle of Halloween activities for your little spooks! It’s important to us that when we make something seasonal that it’s both fun AND meaningful and we’ve worked hard to achieve that with these activities. They’re also differentiated so should be appropriate for grades 1-4! The

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A Teacher’s Guide to Fluency

For a long time, fluency was the forgotten component of reading instruction.  I know it never came up in my college courses!  But in the last 10 years or so, the view has shifted.  Fluency has come to be recognized as a vital skill in developing proficient readers. For the

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