Language Arts Mini-Lessons

Here is a great lesson that we did during our CAFE sessions to help students have a better understanding of contractions.  It's called Contraction Surgery.  The students wore gloves, masks, and used band-aids to heal their helpless patients. The band-aid is your comma :) Here are the steps:

First you make word combos on index cards like He did.  Then the students take the two cards and determine what letters they have to take out by doing "surgery" on the cards.  Sometimes it was a double surgery.  Then they taped it back together to form their contractions with the band-aids.  Some took two band-aids because it was a bit more complicated.  They loved this lesson.

Language Arts Centers for the Classroom

Just stumbled upon some awesome language arts centers that help with teaching phonics.  Working with Daily 5 and Cafe I have come to realize that quick and easy centers not only maintain student attention, but they also help enforce so many different concepts into such a short amount of time.  I take the cards and make these envelopes to keep them all in.  The key is to laminate everything including the worksheets and cards, this way the children can use them as dry-erase and they can be used over and over by multiple children at a time.  I love them for third graders and they are fun and engaging as well.

http://www.amazon.com/Take-Your-Phonics-Centers-Grades/dp/155799983X