5 Insanely Simple Word Work Activities Your Kids Will LOVE!

hi guys it's Melina from Plato to Plato I am so excited because this week we are going to be diving into five insanely simple word work activities you can do in your classroom that your students will beg to do over and over again I promise all of these ideas are really quick and simple to set up but they are super motivating and if your classrooms are anything like mine were when I was still in the classroom full time this time of year can be kind of challenging we have kids who are thinking about spring break or they have spring fever or it's just really pretty outside and they want to stare out the window instead of thinking about what's going on in the classroom so if we have to bring our a-game every single day right so these ideas are gonna help you motivate those kids bring them back and keep them engaged and learning from now and tell the end of the school year so before we dive in I wanted to make sure that I passed along a freebie that would help you in case you're thinking gosh I love doing word work activities but it is so hard to keep track of what kids need to be practicing next so I actually created these about a year ago they are free site word lists I have a set that goes for the adults list if your school uses that there's also a set that goes with the fry words and then if you are in a private school or your district doesn't tell you doesn't dictate exactly what words kids need to be working on in what sequence they need to be working on you can use a third option which actually combines the Dolch and fry words and organizes them based on their frequency so how often kids will see them in books and magazines as their reading so you have three different options I like to print my lists on color-coded right color-coded paper just because it helps me easily see what the kids are working on so for example if this is my pre primer group all of the kids would have a green list and then when they were working in there word work activities they would be pulling activities from a green bin for example or they might be pulling activities from a green folder so I like to match the list with the actual basket of activities that they're working on another example would be if this was my primer group of kids that were working on primer words everything that they grabbed would be on pink so I just happen to be type-a I love organization and so color coding for me is really useful but obviously you can find a system that works best for you in your classroom so I'm going to include that link at the top of this video so you can grab those if there's they'll come in handy but let's go ahead and dive into this first simple word work activity this one you won't you have played this before some time in your lifetime I promise but we're gonna take a classic game and we are going to twist it so we're gonna actually play tic-tac-toe now to start I like to add just fun little pops of excitement to games whenever possible so to play I have just taken paper cut little squares are little rectangles and then on each rectangle I have a different site word that I'd want this group to be working on so you'll remember that I color codes so since the words are written on right pink these words would be the words that my bright pink primer group would be practicing so this is going to be their activity at their table so these are their words and I have the word can on the list I have some others I'm going to wait go ahead and just drag those into a cup this is just a jarring a cup that you can use for canning but you could use a plastic cup for this as well and then find a sock from your drawer I have to tell you it was quite a chore trying to find fun socks because our family has been having a very hard time keeping socks we always have one but not the pair I don't know if you have that problem too but I don't know what happens they just mysteriously vanish and so I have gone - I've decided to implement a news Jim with our sock drawer we all wear white socks so trying to find something fun for this activity was a little bit of a challenge but I managed to scrounge up some socks that I had from a couple years ago anyway okay so here is our fun sock now when kids reach into the sock and pull out a word there's definitely no peeking because the only thing that will fit inside the leg of that sock is of course their hand and arm and now they pull out the word and their word is you so the first player is going to reach in pull out a word this is the word they're going to be writing during the first round of tic-tac-toe they'll be writing you then the second player reaches in pulls out a word whatever word they pull out that's going to be their word for the game so to play each player will write their name in the box here so player one writes you player two writes their name and then they go ahead and just take turns playing tic-tac-toe just like usual but instead of writing X's and O's they are writing their sight words so you can see when the game is all done you have the words to and you they got the person with you had three in a row so they won the game so that makes sense so again this is a freebie you can grab this at the link just above this video but again it's a super simple twist on a classic game and I promise you your kids are going to beg to play that over and over again they can just reach in grab a new word and start a new round the next activity is also super simple it's called magic words and any kid who has ever played this begs to do it over and over again so there is a sheet that I'm passing along to you this week all you're going to do is have your kids write their words with white crayon and when they first write them down it's kind of a nerving because it looks like they haven't done any work because a white crayon on white paper of course looks like nothing it looks like a blank page but once they take a marker just a regular marker I used Crayola but you can use whatever markers you have in your classroom and they color over the white crayon their words magically appear which is why we get the name magic words so you can grab this freebie as well next we have word squares this is another one of those classic games from our childhood that we're just going to go ahead and twist a little bit so here's the sheet that you're going to be getting and two plain words squares you are going to take turns drawing lines that connect two dots so if player one was going they might choose to connect this dot and this dot that can only draw one line between two dots then it's player two's turns so they might decide to connect these two dots player one goes they might connect these two and they keep going now as they go back and forth eventually one of the players is going to make a square just like that and every time they close that Square the player that closes it gets to earn that as a point so when they earn it usually with this game they would just write their initials in the middle but today we're gonna have them switch it and write their site words so in that example that we had before where our player pulled out the word you they if they pulled out that word they would write the word you in the center so by the time that they've worked their way through the page and either the time runs out because this is one of those games that can be played when you have just five spare minutes and you're getting ready to get to music class and need a time filler so let's pretend that it's time for music class now they need to head out the door now they have their game they've gotten a lot of squares they're gonna count the number of squares each player has and the player with the most squares wins but each player has had the chance to write their site words a number of different times so they practice their site word several several times over and over so hopefully we're building that memorization so that they know those words automatically when they see them this next activity is using one of my favorite tools if you watched this stem video from last week you will remember that I am in love with our balance I don't know if it's the color or or just the simplicity of the activity but I have a love there with this balance and it's funny because we get so many questions from people who are wondering where we got this particular balance so if you are one of those people I'm including the Amazon affiliate link in the caption above this as well just so you can grab your own I grabbed this from Amazon a couple years ago I just checked the price this morning and it's actually less expensive now than when I bought it so it's nine dollars so you just need to grab this balance again we're gonna have kids pick to pick words so for this one I just wrote the words on cards you could use index cards as well and then kids are going to pick two words at random so let's pretend that they pick the word me let's see if this is gonna cooperate in balance for us and the word okay here with me a little bit okay so we're gonna know can you kind of see it like that it's kind of sideways but okay so we have me here and the word up here we're gonna pretend those are the words that they picked now we want to see what word weighs more try saying that five times fast so we're going to go ahead and have our kids grab the alphabet magnets that they need to make those words so for the word me we need an M so here's our M and we need an E and then for the word up we need a u and a P and when we balance it out you can see that me is further down it's sitting further down so me is actually heavier than the word up so me would win just by having kids do this little experiment they're practicing spelling and they're also practicing letter recognition so we're strengthening their ability to recognize those sight words when they see them in books and on an other you know stories and that kind of thing later on now one tip that I found from a veteran teacher that I just loved was a little trick to help kids keep track of those alphabet letters because I don't know about you but I has struggled to keep an entire collection of 26 matching alphabet letters for some reason they're like socks actually the alphabet magnets are like socks and they tend to just mysteriously disappear so um a teacher actually color-coded her alphabet magnets she used spray-paint she laid the alphabet magnets on a huge flat piece of cardboard and then spray-painted spray-painted one batch red with spray-paint let those dry then took another piece of took another batch of alphabet magnets laid those out spray-painted that one blue and so on so now the kids know that if they find a red alphabet magnet it goes with the red set if they find a blue alphabet magnet it goes with the blue set isn't that genius I love learning those kind of little tricks so hopefully that'll help you in your classroom too so our last one is actually a word work board game so I love rainbows any time of year but of course spring is a great time to bring out rainbow activities especially because we're seeing rainbows in the sky so here is our editable word work game now to play this this is like all of our editable games you are going to type in the words that you want your kids to work on so remember we have those those lists that I showed you at the very beginning if your kids were working on a primer list you could type in their primer words into the board game for your primer kids then you could switch them out and just type in their different words onto the board game so it'll once you type them in it goes into the right spot and you just hit print and it's all set to go so here's our game to play it's really simple kids are just gonna roll the die move that many spaces so they would start on the start and then it count one two three four if they rolled four they'll read the word he they'll spell the word he H e and then they're gonna write the word on their record sheet so I did this one for you as an example so you can see so they'll write the word under player one then when player 2 goes she rolls she reads she spells and then both players are gonna write that word under player two that way they're getting extra practice they're not only writing their own words but they're also writing their partner's words is that hopefully they'll get that automaticity that we're hoping for so they just keep going along until somebody reaches the finish line now with these games they move pretty quickly and so I like to have kids once they reach finish I like to have him to scoop their playing piece back to start and start again until time is up you can obviously do it however you'd like but I found that that keeps them engaged and they know exactly what to do once they get to the finish they're not done they have to start again and keep going so you guys that is five simple activities that you can do in the classroom to help make word work time more exciting and motivating for your kids next week we have preschool math games I'm so excited to show you all the things that I have in store for you we are going to be moving beyond the numbers one two three and really stretching the activities to keep preschool math exciting and fun for our students now if you have anything on your wish list that you'd like us to cover during these videos please please PLEASE add a comment in the box right below this video we're compiling a list and working our way through it so I promise that we will get to your idea as soon as possible we love you guys thank you so much for watching and stay inspired

Channel: Playdough to Plato

Views: 10,347

Rating: 4.8588233 out of 5

Keywords: iteachfirst, kindergarten, first grade, spelling, word work activities, teacher tips, iteachk

Id: ygCsAuwbD4s

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 28 2018