Ideas for Spelling Activities

Spelling Ideas

One of my weekly challenges is to come up with some ideas for spelling practice each week.  I have a structure that I follow each week.

On Mondays I have the students write the words in their dictionaries.  They also give each other the pretest and correct it.

On Tuesday I generally create a worksheet on the back of the pretest.  It varies from week to week.  So far I have done a couple of different ideas…

1.  Writing sentences on handwriting paper

2.  Writing the spelling words in Rainbow Colors.

3.  Red and Blue Writing….Vowels in red and consonants in blue. 

4.  Spell It and Add It Up  (This was a bigger project than I intended.)

5.  Roll It and Spell It (Lots of fun)

6.  Rhyming Your Spelling Words (Can be difficult depending on your spelling words)

On Wednesday and Thursday we do word sorts from our workbook..

On Friday we do making words activities, I try to find mystery works that have some of our spelling words or skills we are working on.  

This is what I have found so far.  I am always on the look out for good ideas. 

Monday's Mystery Words

At our school we use the Words Their Way Program for Spelling and Phonics in the primary grades. 

I know I will be sorting and creating lots of lists with our spelling each day however I still want to include Monday’s Mystery Word.  My kids just loved this activity last year.  In kindergarten we did this whole group with the pocket chart.

Now as first graders, I purchased their own letters to work with from Lakeshore.  I liked these letters because they were made out of cardboard and appear to be laminated.  The vowels are printed in red and the consonants are printed in blue.    I was disappointed that they only had lowercase letters on one side.  I wish they had the capital letters on the other side.  

source

  I found 24 tool drawer organizer to store at Home Depot to store the letters.  I added red-letter stickers on the outside to easy organize the drawers. W,X,Y,Z had to share drawers. 

I am going to follow the structure in Patricia Cunningham’s Book for the first year and go from there.  

I think the kids will love sorting the letters on their own and finding some of the words before we do the activity as a class.  I can hear the excitement already. 

Keep yours eyes open I will be creating a recording sheet for this soon.