Making Words

I have always been a huge fan of the "making words" activity. Students use letter cards and make words as the teacher dictates. But, the fact that they have a predetermined set of cards to choose from usually with only one vowel choice seemed a little less than challenging. Recently, I began to use more letter cards in my lessons with more than one vowel choice, but the amount of desk space this required was a challenge. Then, I discovered a tutorial on Pinterest for printing onto sticky notes! Gotta love Pinterest and all the brilliant people who pin there!! I immediately went to work designing a template for making words. I wanted to include more than just 26 letter cards. I also wanted to include the vowel teams, digraphs, and blends associated with our first grade curriculum. So, I designed templates for printing the consonants, vowels, vowel teams, digraphs, and blends.

They are mounted onto file folders. I taped two file folders together to create a trifold. I glued the templates onto the file folders and had them laminated. 

Then, using a second copy of the templates, I covered the consonants with blue sticky notes; the vowels and vowel teams with yellow sticky notes, and the digraphs and blends with the orange sticky notes and ran them back through the printer and printed the template onto the sticky notes. Afterwards, I passed out the sheets to the students and they transferred the sticky notes to their laminated "making words" folders. 

And, voila, we have our new making words folders. The kids love them and they are way more challenging than the old way we used to do making words. It is also way cool that the kids now "see" the patterns because of the multicolored sticky notes. They can actually see the beginning, middle, and ending sounds much more than they ever did when using black on white letter cards. 

If you are interested in a copy of this template for making your own "Making Words" folders, visit my TPT store for making your own folders. I promise you will love them!!