Sweet Sunshine! {Five for Friday}

Last night I saw somebody tweeted: “The best way to get students to not act like the school year is over is by having teachers not act like the school year is over.” Guilty. as. charged. Well, sort of. I don’t think I’ve been showing it necessarily, but I certainly have been feeling it. It’s something about sunshine that makes everyone itch to wrap it up. My IEP Annual Reviews are due in the next two weeks and it’s been so hard to come home at night and get back to work and not just go outside and play. But like anything, this too shall pass and I will be playing outside after May 22nd!

{one}
This week I finally finished a product I have been working on since February! It’s something I have been using in my classroom but I just didn’t have it TPT worthy and ready to go (and there is still more that I want to add!) A wonderful special education teacher that I used to work with taught me to use Fry’s Phrases to build fluency and progress monitor. So many of my students can identify sight words in isolation and then as soon as they see it on a page in a book they don’t know it. Sound familiar? I made these cards that were big enough to use whole group, but small enough to be printed and sent home for repeated practice, with some great progress monitoring tools and charts to go along with them. It is a little more than 480 flashcards, and each one has a phrase that is made up of a combination of Fry’s sight words. I will be posting about how I use them soon, but here is a preview. You can buy it here in my TPT store!

{two}
I’m cheap when it comes to buying books. I am a library girl through and through (I get it from my mama). But this week I was in a bind and I had to buy an iBook on my iPad that I wanted to start reading with one of my tutoring kids. I knew she was reading it on her Nook so I figured it would be fun for us both to be reading on our e-readers. After we met yesterday, I fell in love with teaching reading on a digital book! I think there will never be a substitution for real, paper books and I also think kids need to learn to read with real, paper books, but this was a nice treat and it was certainly helpful for what we are working on. For starters, it gets the kids engaged. But it also has so many features that are good for teaching reading comprehension or to help a struggling reader. We went through and we highlighted all of the characters’ names in one color, the setting words in another. We stuck post-it notes at parts that we wanted to take notes. We looked up the definition of unknown words by clicking on them. We increased the font of the book when we got to a tough part. We changed the font so it was easier on our eyes. We just had a ball.

Does anyone have a resource for free or inexpensive digital books for kids? I know you can get them through public libraries now but at my library you have to wait for a few days to get it. Any suggestions?

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This week I joined in the new #teachertalktuesdays thread on Instagram! I’m so happy the girls from What the Teacher Wants and Apples and ABCs started it because it used to be so hard to find other teachers on Instagram. Look no further! Come find me… @misseager.

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I also took part in Gabrielle’s amazing giveaway this week. Have you entered? She collected over 100 products from so many great bloggers. You can win my Call the Cops pack! It ends on Sunday at midnight and you can enter every day! Click below to enter.