Using Spiral Dictionaries in the Classroom

Last year I ordered these awesome spiral dictionaries from Butterflies. I thought that they would be a perfect addition to our writers tool box. Unfortunately I put them in a safe place and only found them again at the beginning of this year. 

I like these spiral dictionaries because of their simplicity. The letters are easy to see and the pages are easy to flip through. Each page only includes common sight words and high frequency words so it's a great start for students who have difficulty scanning. 

To familiarise my Year One students with the dictionaries I set up a few different activities which they completed during reading groups.

Firstly I gave my students a template of a word similar to an acrostic poem and my students simply had to find a word in the dictionary that began with the given letter.

The next activity involved students searching for incorrectly spelt words that I had written on the board.  Once they had found the word they re wrote it correctly.

Once they had a handle on searching and finding I had them find words that they had circled in their writing books.  Circled words are words that they think may be spelt wrong. They then used the dictionary to correct their words.

This has become an activity to be completed once a week during reading groups, however I am finding now that they are editing their writing as during guided writing time and this extra time is become increasingly unnecessary, which makes me one very happy teacher!

Beck xx

Dinosaur Egg Observations

Last term I did a mini unit on dinosaurs and to say my students loved it would be an understatement! Dinosaurs is such an easy theme to introduce. One the best activities that we did during this unit was growing, hatching and observing our own dinosaur eggs.

I found the eggs online (eBay) and bought about 60 for less than $20 and they came like this.

I gave each student an egg and a plastic cup of water with their name on it. We made predictions about what they thought would happen to their egg (I didn't tell them there were dinosaurs inside) and then they put them in the water.

Each day they observed their egg using their five senses. I set up the table below so that they could observe their eggs easily.

They absolutely loved filling in their observation books. This was a great writing task for some of my more reluctant writers. 

 When our dinosaur eggs were finally finished growing we used our dinosaur books to attempt to work out what sort of dinosaurs we had. This was probably their favourite part! I wish I had recorded the conversations that were going on while they did their research. 

This was such a fun little experiment that filtered into lots of reading and writing activities. I'm so glad that I had a pack of 60 eggs, I'm ready to go again next year! Although I did send a few extras home for younger siblings. 

Beck xx