Blog Hoppin': Rhyming Dust Bunnies Freebie!

Hi friends! I am Katie King from Queen of the First Grade Jungle! I am a new author for Blog Hoppin', and I am oh so happy to be here! Many of the ladies that write for this blog are the reason that I started blogging myself!

Today I wanted to share with you a great beginning of the year activity to introduce word families or reiterate rhyming to your first graders.

Aren't these little guys the cutest? One of my students bought this book for me at the book fair a couple of years ago, and I immediately fell in love with it!

We are starting spelling tests this week with the -at family, and I wanted to come up with an interesting way to have them understand word families and really "get it." This book did just that.

We came to our meeting spot with our ipads.

Yes, you have permission to hate me.

clipart courtesy of Ashley Hughes

I have 25 glorious ipads in my room through a 1-to-1 grant from my district.

During this lesson we used the ipads as a way for me to check the students' understanding! Each time one of the adorably silly dust bunnies asked for a word that rhymes with another word, my students recorded their guesses on a free whiteboard app. As soon as they finished, they held up their ipads so I could quickly scan for understanding.

We repeated this procedure three or four times during the story. My student engagement was through the roof! I secretly was wishing one of my administrators would peek in my room at that exact moment!

We were able to talk about several different word families and write many CVC words! At the end of our lesson we completed a very simple handout to display in our hallway.

We glued sparkly pompoms in the middle to act as our dust bunnies (found in the craft section of many stores)!