Upcycle

 I find great pleasure in taking old windows that are going to be discarded and upcycling them into mirrors or mosaic windows.

Teachers have always been fantastic at "up cycling". Tiny budgets and shortages of time make it a necessity.  We are constantly taking ideas, strategies and materials, and turning them into something useful for our students.

Students, and sometimes myself, tire of the traditional flash card practice. Here are a few of my favorite upcyled ideas to use with students for drill and practice work. These ideas work well in small group instruction.


1. Hide and Seek  My students always love this one and will request it daily. It is a win-win situation. They are racing around having a blast while practicing our target skill as quickly as possible. I hide the flashcards around the classroom as an opening activity. They find one card at a time and race back to me to. Sometimes they just simply read the word or name the sound. Other times I challenge them with an additional question (such as name a word that ends with the sound, name a rhyming word, segment the word, etc...)

2. Lay Them Straight  One of my issues with traditional flash card drills (teacher holds up card and student responds) is we don't read that way. This process does not increase a student's ability to read right to left with one to one matching. Why not lay a row of 5-6 cards in front of the student? What I love about this is that all the students in the group will have a row of words to practice while their classmates read their row. Sometimes I have the students stand up and travel around the table reading each row or ask them a challenging question as suggested above.

3. Go Fish  Often on Fridays (or sub days) we play card games with our target skills. Go Fish is  a favorite!

4. Memory/Concentration  To make this game a bit easier for my younger students or those with memory difficulties, I put a piece of masking tape down the middle of the table. I put one set of cards on each side, therefore they know they have to pick one card from each side to find the match.

5. Tic Tac Toe  Instead of writing an X or an O, students write a letter or a word that they are practicing.

6. Bingo Students can make their own Bingo boards. Dictate sounds or words that you are practicing and have your students write in the squares of folded paper or laminated blank Bingo boards. Then play a quick round of Bingo.


I hope you try out some of my upcyled strategies. Let me know how they worked. Parents, these would be great fun at home, too.