Flash Sale: July 4

Happy 4th of July everyone!  Today as part of my Flash Sales of Back to School products I would like to share with you my Read It, Trace It, Put the Sentence together packs.  I have them for almost everything imaginable, but today's feature is the Back to School pack.

 These came as an idea from one of my teammates a few years back when we were looking for an easy idea for a writing station.  I created between 5-10 sentences for each theme idea and then created these two different formats.  These were the first things I sold on TpT when I first started out!  There are two forms- one with traced lines and the other with blank lines.

When I am first starting out with these, we do them whole class.  In fact, I model them under the document camera.  I always begin using the traced version because it is much easier for the littles to do this at the beginning of the year.  I read the sentence to them.  We practice reading it together tracking the print across the page.  Then we read the sentence as it is written at the bottom.  The littles get a big kick out of the fact that it doesn't make sense at the bottom.  We talk about what a sentence starts with (a capital letter) and ends with (punctuation- usually a period).  We find those in the boxes at the bottom.  They cut out the boxes at the bottom (great fine motor practice) and then we begin matching the words and creating the sentence.  We talk about going left to right across the page and putting small spaces between words (just like we do in writing).

Once they are finished with the sentence, we read it one more time and match it up with the sentence above to make sure we are correct.

Then, in the space at the bottom we draw a picture.  I model drawing the picture- reading the sentence and thinking about what I could put in my picture.  We talk about using the whole space; we talk about correct color (your teacher is NOT purple); we talk about adding details; we talk about how we don't want people to float in space- all those little drawing things you want to transfer over to their other drawings- but things that take A LOT of reinforcement!

Once we do many of these whole group, then the Read It, Trace Its become part of my THEME station.  My theme station is basically a Science/Social Studies station and other versions of these (apples, community workers, bats, American symbols- the list goes on and on) become one of the choices of what students do at that station.  Eventually, we transition to the blank lines (and I have to model that piece multiple times when we do).

The littles never get tired of these because the sentences are always changing.  You can differentiate it a bit if they finish the sentence early, they can write and illustrate an additional sentence on the back that tells more about the first sentence.