Welcome to our Blog Swap and Hop. We have many teachers guest blogging on each other’s blogs today. Hopefully you will find some new ideas and freebies along the way.
My guest blogger is Michelle from Inspired By Kindergarten with a wonderful post about fonts. After you read her post, you can head to Forever in First for my post about Back To School goodies. You will also find a linky for the blog hop at the bottom of this wonderful post:)
Hello! I am Michelle from Inspired By Kindergarten and I am so excited to be guest blogging on Kinder Alphabet today! I’ve been teaching for 14 years (2 years Title Math teacher, 7 years First Grade and 6 years Kindergarten). I “met” Lidia through Facebook and was so excited to get the chance to guest post for her! I’ll be honest with you. . . when it’s someone else’s blog you put a LOT more effort into what you write. 🙂 It’s a little long today but FILLED with freebie!
Ok, onto our topic: Funny Fonts
For me it’s a love/hate relationship. Anyone out there use the old DIBELS assessment? If you did you’ll remember the horrible funky looking “g” they put on the first line. WHY? The kids would look at that “g” and just freeze up. Even giving them the answer and encouraging them to keep going was fruitless. Their confidence was gone and they were DONE. Ugh. And funky fonts are EVERYWHERE! There’s no getting away from them. So. . . instead of kicking, screaming and crying over it (me, not the kids) I decided to start teaching it. WOW. . . the letter naming confidence level of my kids shot through the roof! I saw huge improvement in my ELL students and all kids in general. The best part was it’s really not that hard to do! For the rest of this post I will stop rambling (promise) and give you 5 tips on how to get funky fonts into your classroom!
1. When you label the students cubbies, mailboxes, notebooks, journals, etc. at the beginning of the year choose a different font for each spot.
2. Put several sets of alphabet flashcards, each with a different font, in your reading centers. You’ll find these all over the web but to save you some time just click the pic for your free copy of these funky font flashcards (also includes a page with suggestions on how to use):
3. Save old food boxes to cut letters out of. This is a super cheap way to collect hundreds of funky fonts. Plus you get several sizes so they are great for all sorts of sorting! : )
I recently reorganized my stamps and kept the case the stamps came in. I saved it for sorting the smaller letters.
However, if you don’t have something like this you could have the kids sort the letters onto an alphabet poster:
Or a simple sorting sheet (click picture to download yours):
4. For more independent practice check out some of these packets from TPT:
5. Show a slide show of letters in different fonts. This is a new activity for me so I’ve only created one file so far. The first letters my class work on are M, S, R and T so I’ve created a PowerPoint that focuses on those 4 letters. The first part of the presentation is “shout it out” time where the kids literally shout the letters out loud as they flick on the screen. The next part of the presentation slows down so the kids can graph the letters they see. I even put some “non examples” in this part and a sad face on the graph for kids to use when “non examples” appear.
AND/OR
I’ve also included the jpg images of the letters from the Power Point. I plan on getting my students used to the activity and then loading the images onto a digital frame for kids to use during reading centers.
I found this awesome picture frame on Amazon.com last summer. It’s also a dry erase board so I can write the focus letters on the frame. Plus, it has a record feature so I can record a message to the kids and they can press the green button to hear it. Click on the picture to get one for yourself. Sorry, the picture frame isn’t a freebie! : ( : ( : (
However, I do have my MRST Power Point, jpg images and graph available if you are willing to be a guinea pig and try it out with me! All you have to do to receive a copy is follow this blog, leave Lidia a comment and include your e-mail address.
Thanks so much for taking the time to read this blog post!
I hope you found something new and useful for you and your kinders!
document.write(‘
