Where has the time gone!? I have a whole list of blog posts ready to go, but we have been so busy in school with all kinds of fun things that I have also been busy creating new resources to use in my room!  Excited to share some with you all soon.

First up… I was surprised with a fun newsletter spot in the TpT newsletter last weekend!  They featured my GROUPS Acronym Poster.  Remember this blog post?  It got so many hits and repins on Pinterest that I decided to create a poster everyone could just print out easily!  I also made miniature versions, too so that you could put them right on student desks (one person commented that they put them in small photo frames for each table group. LOVE that idea!)  If you haven’t grabbed it already, download it now for FREE!  I have loved hearing all of the wonderful feedback from it.

With my 4th grade intervention group, we just finished up hard & soft c and g and are doing a quick lesson on -dge and -ge endings before moving on.  They REALLY struggled with this, and since my goals with the intervention groups are both encoding and decoding skills, we had to spend some time really looking at these word endings.  I ended up making a word sort and story to use with my students to get A LOT of practice in.  They loved it, and we have actually had a great time with it.

I started with a little anchor chart (there are a lot more words now, but I forgot to take an updated picture).  We talked about the rules, and I did some dictation of words with them.  They were having a hard time hearing the long vs. soft vowels or consonants RIGHT BEFORE the /j/ sound, so in came the visual word sort and story!

We did the word sort together on the floor  (this is perfect for a small group lesson).  I put the ‘-ge’ and ‘-dge’ headings up first and had them read the words and sort them into the correct pile.  Then, I added the second ‘-ge’ heading card, and we added the rule cards and discussed them.  Then, we sorted the cards to determine how we knew they belonged in each of the ‘-ge’ categories.  It was really great to be able to hear them justify their placements and say things like “‘sage’ has a ‘-ge’ at the end because it has a long vowel ‘a’ right before the /j/ sound.”  They copied the rules and wrote out the words on their worksheet.  We read off of these sheets for several days, practicing our words.

When we finished that, we moved on to reading my original “-ge” and “-dge” ending story, Serge’s Strange Day!  It’s a goofy story, really, but it has a lot of /j/ sounds endings.  As we read, we pointed out all of the words, and the kids had blank cards to put new words on and add to the sort.  Download your word sort and silly story for FREE here!  I most certainly hope it can help your kiddos.

Reading the story and writing new words (with dry erase marker) on laminated cards.