When you give a teacher some time, she will.......

Hello all!

Yesterday I was at school for a few hours and presently my classroom is a mess! BUT it is an organized mess! I took everything out of my cabinets and am cleansing them! I have so much stuff that just needs to go. I am using this rule of thumb: If I haven't used it for 2 years, then it must go! So yesterday was my literacy cabinet cleaning. As I was working, I realized that I wasn't blown away by my alphabet poster cards. Plus we adopted the Jolly Phonics reading program last year and even though we LOVE the program, we found it to be colorless. As all of us know in Early Education, color is a MUST to keep little minds focused on the task at hand. So............ just like the book "When you give a mouse a cookie", when you put a teacher in her classroom and give her some time, she will probably come up with a million ideas that lead from one thing to another until finally, she is back where she started! And that has been ME!! I decided I wanted alphabet cards that were colorful AND differentiated. I wanted my small group Word Work to match the large alphabet cards that would hang on my walls. I also wanted alphabet cards that correlated with our Jolly Phonics series as well as cards that were filled with higher level reading skills such as consonant digraphs and r-controlled vowels. So.......... that is what I have been working on since yesterday afternoon! I was at my computer when the Fab 5 Olympic gymnasts earned their gold medals and when Michael Phelps earned his with his relay team! I was up at 6:00 a.m. this morning sitting at my computer AND I even dreamed of these posters! Silly, I know!

Anyway, I thought that I would share what I came up with and give you a Freebie as well! I realize that it takes tons of ink to print these type of resources... :(
But the good thing is that once they are printed, they can be laminated and used over and over again. I thought that I would use the smaller cards as a matching game in my small groups and then add them to Word Work as the year progresses. I did not include a recording sheet or any games in this resource. They are simply a visual cue for letter sounds.
Here is a picture of what I included in the resource:

If you click here, you will be taken to a Google doc that will give you a sample of 2 of the pages.

If you click here, you will be taken to a Google doc that will give you Jolly Phonics alphabet poster cards that are NOT included in the resource above! Please note that the entire alphabet is NOT included in this freebie - only those alphabet cards that follow the sounds of Jolly Phonics. Also, these cards are NOT endorsed by Jolly Phonics! The cards are my ideas created to use in my own classroom. They might not work for your reading/phonics system!

I like that they are going to be large enough that my kiddos will be able to see them from afar. I THINK that I am going to hang both the regular alphabet posters and Jolly Phonics poster pictures together; like this photo. Of course, I will teach each letter sound first and then hang the posters next to each other. We teach one letter/sound a day so we get through them pretty quickly!

Oh gosh, I just answered the doorbell and guess what just came? Yikes! My Cameo is here and I have no idea how to use it! Let's see............. if you give a teacher a Cameo, she will.........! Stay tuned!

Have a great day!