Well, we finally did it! We found a place that would print our Alphabet Pattern Blocks cards and Sounds Fun cards for us at a reasonable price! We also made a Sounds Fun poster that is a wonderful thing to have, because it has all of the cards blown up in one easy to handle or hold poster. This is great news for everyone who has been put off by the idea of having to download and print your own Alphabet Pattern Blocks cards and Sounds Fun cards. The cards turned out beautifully! They are on a nice, glossy, medium weight cardstock that look and feel pretty sturdy and may not even need to be laminated!
My kids love using the Alphabet Pattern Blocks cards and I have found that they can be used as a nice, ready-made literacy center for alphabet practice, and later in the year, to have the children make words, too! Last year, (using the cards that I had printed myself,) I had my kids first make the words with real blocks on the cards. Then, I printed out the letters for each child in black and white and had parent volunteers glue them down to help them practice certain “trouble” words, such as “that” and “they.” I discovered that if you trim the letters very close, you can fit four lower case letters on a 12 x 18 piece of construction paper. Then the kids can make their own big words to keep, by gluing down paper pattern blocks onto the shapes! I had the kids do this activity with a parent volunteer one day. Each child had either the word, “they” or the word, “that.” When he or she was done gluing down the pattern block letters, then they had to share with the group (or at least the parent volunteer!) what word they made, and how they knew it was “that,” instead of “they,” etc. This seemed to really help them zero in on the differences between each word, and the children seemed to have a much better grasp of these two words when we were done with this activity! Of course, the spelling songs help, too!
Yesterday, my daughter had her friend Joe and his six year old little sister Lisa over to swim. We asked her if she would be willing to try out our new Alphabet Pattern Blocks Cards, and she was happy to oblige! She had never seen the cards before, but recognized the pattern blocks immediately from school, and seemed to know exactly what to do! She just started in counting all of the colored spaces for the different blocks, collected the correct amount, and then placed them on the letters. It occurred to me that with older children, you could easily assign a value to each block and then have them calculate the value of each letter, and then also each word! By the same token, you could also assign each block a coin or dollar amount, and have a child calculate the how much money their name is worth! I guess that the activities that you could do with these cards are only limited by your imagination.
Last year, when I first introduced these Alphabet Pattern Blocks to my students, I was surprised that they really didn’t know right away what to do with them, or which blocks should go where! It seemed so obvious to me that I figured that it might be too easy for Kindergartners. Actually, it was more challenging than I imagined; I did have to explain that they would need to match the shapes and the colors, like a puzzle. And, part of the challenge is in the fine motor skills. They have to place each block carefully where it belongs, and then put the next one down without knocking off the first ones.
As far as the Sounds Fun cards are concerned, my class this year made incredible progress by using these cards! I introduced the /sh/, /th/, and /ch/ as they became necessary in the fall. Then, in January, I introduced the rest of the cards. I was a little nervous about introducing the cards, because I always wonder if it is going to confuse them with their regular letter sounds. But so far, it hasn’t, and this is the second year that I have used the cards! The kids absolutely loved doing the actions in the cards, and seemed to remember the characters and their sounds almost immediately. The day after I introduced them, as the children entered in the morning, they noticed that I had placed a set of Sounds Fun cards on the wall. The first thing I heard out their mouths was, /ow!/, /ar!/, /er!/, /oo!/, etc. In fact, that whole week, there seemed to be barely a moment when someone was NOT muttering one of these sounds to themselves! It just about drove me bonkers! This was an incredibly verbal class that I had, and then loved to talk (and apparently, also make all kinds of random sounds!) Thankfully, they got used having the cards on the wall, and eventually were able to concentrate on my lessons again without continually muttering the sounds to themselves.
I probably drilled the class on the Sounds Fun cards three times a week in January, and maybe a handful of times in February. After that, we just referred to the cards on the wall and the poster when we needed a sound. Everybody seemed to know most of the sounds, and by the end of the year, many of the children were able to make a sound to themselves and think of a possible spelling without looking at the cards at all. Lots of children were finding these letter combinations in the books that they were reading, too, and they were quite excited to find them there! It was like somebody showed them a secret code. :)
I especially LOVED having a Sounds Fun poster! I really felt that I needed one, but the posters that you could have printed online were too expensive. So I had my husband make one for me by blowing up the Sounds Fun Single Sheet at work so that it would be poster sized and printing it out there in four sections. Then I glued it to a poster board, and laminated it. That’s what I had to do to get my poster! Luckily, we now have one that is affordable and ready to use. I like having my poster right on my white board easel where I did a lot of writing with my class. I kept the poster on the back of my easel when I wasn’t using it, and then brought it around to the front and clipped it to the side of the easel where they could see it when I was writing Each time I came to a sound that was on the Sounds Fun cards, I made the sound and asked the kids what character made that sound. Somebody always knew, and then I would have somebody point to the right character. Then I would copy the letters that made that sound and go on with my sentence. It was incredibly helpful! Then I put copies of that same Sounds Fun Single Sheet on my writing table so that they could see the letters up close whenever they needed them. I do have the cards posted on the wall, but there are so many things posted on the wall that after a while, it gets to be a bit too much of an issue of sensory overload! Also, you can’t possibly post all of the word wall words and all of the alphabet, plus all of the Sounds Fun cards close enough to every child so that they can see them well enough to use them easily. So that is how I came up with the idea of putting them all onto a single sheet. Luckily, they all FIT! Now I have enough of these single sheets printed out for the children to all have one attached to their wandering word walls.
My kids were writing some pretty amazing little stories by the end of the year, if I do say so myself! And I think that a big part of that was that they had a very good handle on the alphabet sounds, and knew how to “encode” most of the rest of the sounds that they encountered when they were trying to sound out and write their words, thanks to their Sounds Fun cards.
My class has been so “into” that Zero the Hero song and super heroes in general this year that I thought that it would be fun to make a Zero the Hero project! But what we really needed was to make a Father’s Day card! The solution? I decided to create a Super Dad Father’s Day card! So I decided to check out the picture that I had taken with Zero the Hero at the last Kindergarten conference that I attended, and model the picture after that. Then I wrote “SD” on the shirt and had the kids write, “Super Dad” on the top of the card! On the inside, we wrote, “Dear Dad, You are my hero! Love, ____.” I also had the kids write a letter to their dad, telling him what they would like to thank him for. The cards turned out “super” cute!
One thing I did to make it a little easier was to have parents draw a little “x” where the head should be glued. The head must be glued down first in the right place, or the children will not be able to complete the project at all, because there has to be room for the rest of the body. The only other thing that proved difficult was getting them to put the narrow part of the body (the waist) towards the bottom and the broad shoulders towards the top. They kept wanting to reverse it. Excluding this, the rest of the project was not hard at all! The children immediately recognized the super hero as Zero the Hero, but were very excited to turn him into a picture of their dad. For the hands and the head, I offered both light and dark skin to accommodate the different families that we have in our class, so that the super heroes would better honor and resemble the childrens’ real fathers.
To prepare this project, we had parents pretrace the muscled part of the arms, the cape, and the boots. Next year, I think that I will make a master and just run those pieces off on the copy machine, because that was a lot of tracing! The rest of the pieces were just cut to the correct size square or rectangle. The children had to trim the corners of the squares for the head and the hands in order to turn the squares into circles. It was lots of fun, and the children were incredibly excited! They can’t wait to give the card to their fathers!
Well, we are done “test piloting” my newest CD, Sing and Spell Vol. 5: Number Words and More Sight Words. (These number songs are of course different from the other number songs, since these songs actually teach the kids to spell the number words, rather than teach them to recognize the numbers as in Jumpin Numbers Volumes One and Two.) This CD has lots of songs on it with a rock and roll or a hip-hop type of feel to them. The kids, especially the boys, just LOVE the songs with a lot of electric guitar! One of them started to lay down on the carpet to play his “air guitar,” and that was it! Now they are always down on the floor whenever they certain songs come on, such as the songs for “Four” and “Find.” It’s a bit amusing, because the girls are so tired of watching the boys lay down on the floor to play their guitars that they just stand there with their hands on their hips and watch the boys with thinly veiled disgust! What is even more amusing is that I doubt that most of those boys have the slightest idea what it is they are imitating! We finally had to make a rule that they could only do this on the intro to the Four song, and after that, had to stand up and do the song the regular way. This did help, thankfully!
When I first wrote the number songs, I forgot to include a song for the number zero. When I did finally remember it, all I could think of was, “I don’t WANT to make up another song! And I can’t think of anything anyway!” But one of my brighter students said one day, “Hey! We don’t have a zero song!” Ugh! I knew that I would have to come up with one. Then I had the idea of making the zero spelling song into a song that also was about Zero the Hero! My boys this year are obsessed with super heroes, and always are writing their little stories about how they turn into super heroes and catch all of the bad guys, and they fly away. I knew that this type of song would be a huge hit with my class this year, and probably many others, too! So, after much thought, and turning some lyrics around and around in my head in the shower and in the middle of the night, I came up with the words that I wanted. It goes like this:
Zero might sound like nothing to you, But he’s our hero, brave and true! Looking for the numbers with a zero at the end, Counting them all over and beginning again!
Z-E-R-O! Zero the Hero! Z-E-R-O! Zero the Hero! Z-E-R-O! Zero the Hero! Z-E-R-O! Zero the Hero!
Then, all I needed was a melody. Now whenever I get stuck with lyrics that seem to fit together well, but no melody to put them with, I ask my arranger, Mike Cravens, to see if he can come up with one for me, and I suggested a “Mighty Mouse” type of feel. But then he came up with the idea of making it sound something along the lines of the “Greatest American Hero” song. The tune he came up with is just great! He emailed the song to me, and I asked him to make a few adjustments based on what I thought the kids would like and learn best from, and then he emailed the song back to me. I absolutely LOVE what we came up with! I’ve got the kids pretending to fly around the room looking for zeros, just like Zero the Hero. Then they all jump and punch the air, shouting, Z-E-R-O! Zero the Hero!” I think that this is going to be one of our “signature” songs! Even if your kids don’t need to learn to spell any of the words on this CD, you may want to get it just for the Zero the Hero song. It’s THAT much fun!
Some other really fun ones, the class favorites this year, are: Four (Has a “Stray Cats” style to it!) Six (This one is a spy thriller) Eight (This one takes the Eency Weency Spider, gives it a spooky sound and a rock and roll twist) But (A way cool hip hop song that is SO much fun to dance to!) Under (Has a hip hop feel to it, and is almost a rap. Helps kids learn the position word as well as the spelling of it, too) Say (Has a Caribbean marimba in it that makes it really fun to dance to!) Says (This is a really fun hip hop rock song that the kids just go CRAZY for!) So (This song has them doing things like, “wiggle, wiggle, just like so!” and “move it, move it, just like so!)
The “Eat” song is so much fun to sing too, and it addresses the problem of kids not wanting to eat their food at mealtime. It gets faster and faster as it goes along. It has a soul/gospel feel to it. Here are the words:
Eat (I’m Gonna Sing, Sing, Sing)
I”m gonna E-A-T, I”m gonna E-A-T, I’m gonna eat, I’m gonna eat, All my food! When it’s time to eat my lunch, I’m gonna sit and munch, munch, munch! I’m gonna E-A-T all my food!
The “Fight” song is a GREAT song for conflict resolution, and the kids love to sing it, too! I have been able to use it to help kids memorize the steps to solve problems when they come up with their classmates. This one is just a rap; there is no melody at all. Here are the words to it:
Fight (By Heidi Butkus)
F-I-G-H-T! We don’t fight! F-I-G-H-T! We don’t fight! Talk it over. Walk away. Find another game to play! Talk it over. Walk away. Find another game to play! F-I-G-H-T! We don’t fight! F-I-G-H-T! We don’t fight!
The “Please” song is another good one to sing to the kids when they are forgetting to use the “magic word.” Here are the words to it:
Please (Loopy Loo)
P-L-E-A-S-E! P-L-E-A-S-E! Oh, please, say please! Remember it please! P-L-E-A-S-E!
I need a paper, please! I need a pencil, please! I need a puppy, please! Pretty /p/, pretty /p/, please!
I took a video of my class singing to lots of these songs right before Open House, and I played it for the parents when they came using my projector and a large screen I borrowed. The parents just loved it! What a great thing to do to take the pressure off of me, as the “hostess” of Open House! They were all so happy to see their little cuties on my large screen that almost no one peppered me with questions on how their child was doing. Hooray! :)
