Show and Tell Tuesday - Spelling

This week's Show and Tell is a continuation of this weekend's post about how I do spelling in my room. You can check out the first part HERE.

Today, I'll continue with some of ways my kids actually work with their words during the week.

One of our centers is always spelling. I like to change it up from time to time and I always offer more than one activity choice. Here are some of my kids enjoying making their words from play-doh. What kid doesn't love some play-doh?

I also pre-program some "iphones" with our spelling list words for the year, and they can practice texting the words to themselves. I really can't remember where I got these iphone templates, but they're out there in cyberspace somewhere...

The play-doh task cards and some of the other things we do with our words are in this set of 52 Spelling Center Activity Task Cards, which you can check out HERE. You can also pick up a free sample set HERE. I tried to make them really kid and teacher friendly with explicit directions, pictures and examples of completed activities on each card.

Something else my kids love is the magnetic letters. I had them using cookie sheets for a while, but I found that they were spending so much time looking for the letters in the box and not so much time spelling. So I decided to put all of the letters in my pocket chart, that way all of the letters are clearly on display and they just have to pluck them from the pocket to spell.

Two-fer pic of the magnetic letters in chart and the spelling bee reminder.

Each week I also have a spelling bee. I always start with the list from the current week and we go backwards through recent lists until they get too easy. Then I pull out the challenge list. This is a list of words that I've both sent home and have available in the classroom for the kids to study as an early finisher activity. The winner of the spelling bee gets to skip Thursday night's spelling homework and the spelling test on Friday. They BEG me for the spelling bee on Thursday!

In the last post I told you how I do homework this year, but in the past I've used a different type of spelling contract. If you want to check them out, you can download this first one HERE (it's a freebie)

and this one isn't uploaded to share anywhere, but you can get an idea from the picture.

And now it's time for you to link up and share how you do spelling in your room! The only rule is that you must grab the button below and link to a blog post, not directly to a store.

And just a little PS about Show and Tell. After this week, it will become a monthly feature instead of a weekly event :)