First off let me Congratulate Alison Rose! She is the winner of three David Shannon books including his latest, Bugs in My Hair! Congrats Alison, I've sent you an email and hope to hear from you soon!!

Now for the Nonsense fluency fun! I have a group of first graders this year and I love working with them. After teaching 4th-6th all morning it can be refreshing to have the little ones who just love hands on activities and eat up everything I've thrown at them! Here's a look at how we've been practicing our nonsense word fluency!
This is from our sticky word hunt. I wrote words on different colored sticky notes and hid them around the room. I gathered everyone on the rug and said "find a greed word card",  they found the words, brought them back and we read them. Then they decided if they were real or nonsense and placed them on the correct side of our sort chart. We looked again for blue words and finally yellow words.
These graphs are from our timed fluency practice activity you can find as a part of a new unit I have for sale HERE! We have word cards with various nonsense words on them and I time them reading the words to me. They record their number correct in one minute, then practice the words again. Each day we time ourselves and record our words read.
 We used tongs to "grab" letters (bottle caps with letters written on them placed in a basket) and then made words from the letters. We read our words together and decided if they were real or nonsense.
 We recorded our words on this chart, you can pick up HERE!
 We used letter beads and put them on pipe cleaners to create words, then sorted the real from the nonsense.
 More word building with letter bubbles (I made these a few years ago and they have been so useful, I've used them with almost every grade level to practice spelling, sight words, and making words.)
 Foam letters too! One of my little guys was so excited about the words he made, he really wanted me to get a picture!! Can you tell who his favorite characters are??!!
 We played hopscotch with the hopscotch board I made a few years ago as well (it's plastic pockets taped together so they can have different words placed inside, they read the words as they hop on them)
We did a nonsense and real word ball toss. I wrote words on ping pong balls, then placed two buckets one for real and one for nonsense words in front of the group. Each student got a ball, read the word, tossed it into the correct basket, and got back in line for another turn! At the end we recorded our real and nonsense words on THIS CHART!

We made words using these CVC word cards I got a few years ago online, unfortunately I couldn't find them now to share where I got them from. I glued them to cute animal print scrapbook paper and laminated so we can write on them and wipe it off.
I made these clip cards using some Martha Stewart Labels (that I got for free at our Teachers Store!! Love that place!!) and bright cards stock. I put one real word and one nonsense word on each card, then using these little apple clips I got in the dollar section in Michaels, they clipped the real word on each card! 

This fun sort came to me one morning while I was thinking of getting out the fall decorations, I thought why not use trees to sort real and nonsense words. I cute the trees out of brown construction paper. I had these cute little owl sticky notes from Target's Dollar spot that worked perfectly. I wrote real and nonsense words on them and placed them on the table. 

The students took turns choosing words and sorting them onto the correct tree! They loved it!!
This activity was easy and fun! I created this page of leaves with real and nonsense words on them, the students colored the real words yellow and the nonsense words orange. It turned out to be a great assessment for me. You can get this sheet HERE!

When we did assessments this week these little guys and gals hit it out of the park!! Most of them doubled their correct letter sound scores and all of them increased their whole words read!! Proud teacher I am!! I was so excited to see those scores! I look forward to continuing our adventure into reading!



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