Welcome!

Hello!

I am Mrs. Gomez--welcome to my blog! I have taught Kindergarten in the past, but this year I will be starting an all-new adventure in First Grade!

There were many things that I wanted to make this summer to make my classroom great. My first mission was to create signs to go along with my Reading Buddies. 

Reading Buddies are something that I started last year, thanks to an idea from a friend of mine. The idea was simple: Assign a stuffed animal (I used Beanie Babies) to a reading strategy. When a student got stuck on a word, they tried one of the strategies we had learned while holding the animal that represented the strategy. Here are some of my strategy-animal match ups:

There are many more too! I am excited to have the signs to go along with the animals. I plan to print them on card stock, laminate them, and bind them together. Then I will just put them in a bin with the animals themselves!

My kids last year LOVED these. (I wish I had thought to take pictures of them in use!) I think it really helped the students think about the different strategies they could use to help them solve a word. I think it prevented them from just giving up because they wanted to be able to hold more animals. Now that I am moving into First Grade, I am excited to add more animals/strategies that would be age appropriate for them.

The great thing about these is that they can easily be changed to suit the unique needs of your classroom. If you don't have the exact stuffed animals that I have, you can also get creative with the animal names as well. For example, "Changer, the Chameleon" used to be "Flipper, the Dolphin" until Flipper was tragically taken out of the game (R.I.P., Flipper.)

I put the fully editable powerpoint up in my TpT store for FREE, so you can download it there and edit as you need!

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for more of my summer work!