Word Wizard

I am so excited to finally share my latest work of heart with you. I've been using these activities with my class for the last couple of years and I finally polished them up enough to share with you! I call them Weekly Word Wizards (well, now I do. I found a cute wizard graphic and he was quite inspiring!)

Each week I use one of these printable activities as my Language Arts focus. Once the kids are familiar with each part, it also makes a great word work center, independent seat work, bell work or even homework. I tend to do a lot of centers, projects, games and oral discussions so I really like having this printable activity to keep tabs on their mastery of these essential skills.

At the beginning of the year, there may be some concepts that are new to the kids, but it's amazing how quickly they can complete them independently! I usually complete the first week with my students just a few boxes at a time over the course of a week. Then the next week, we preview the page together and discuss the skills that are particularly new, like prefixes or suffixes. Then I allow the kids to work with partners to compete the activity. Then of course, we check it together. By the third week, I can usually start to give it to them as independent work to finish, maybe over the course of a couple of days. I also have a Helpful Hints sheet up on the board that they can refer to if they forget what one of the skills means.  This one activity will help you introduce, review and practice the 21 following skills:

1. usage/agreement
2. spelling
3. parts of speech
4. antonyms
5. synonyms
6. homonyms
7. capitalizing proper nouns
8. sentence types
9. compounds
10. plural forms
11. prefix and base words
12. suffixes and base words
13. contractions
14. abbreviations
15. reference and research
16. rhyming words
17. pronouns
18. analogies
19. alphabetical order
20. categorizing
21. brainstorming

So, here's what it looks like:

Here are the Helpful Hints pages I post for the kids to refer to when working independently either in a center or at their seat:

If you click {HERE} you can download a freebie to try with your students. As you can imagine, to put together a year's worth of these pages is seriously time consuming. I've listed the first nine-weeks set in my TpT store for $5.00. That includes a two-page printable for each of the 9 weeks, answer keys and the Helpful Hints poster for your classroom. Click {HERE} if you'd like to purchase the set. (The freebie is completely different, so you'll be getting nine new activities)

I hope you find them as useful and time-saving as I do!

Find some more great grammar ideas here at Lori's Linky!