Free Word Search Puzzle Creator

Hopefully you all had a restful day off and now you are back in action!

Challenge: I challenge you to spend 2 minutes talking face to face with one of your students about something they enjoy. The topic can be anything that interests them, but you must spend no less than 2 straight minutes without any interruptions.
Sound Easy??? Well, try it. If you succeed at this challenge, please post a comment telling about your experience. Trust me, it is so worth the two minutes!

Have fun teaching vocabulary words with this free Word Search Puzzle Creator. Just add a title, add vocabulary words, and click "create puzzle."

• Free Vocabulary Word Search Puzzle Creator - Create Your Own Word Search Puzzles to Practice Vocabulary Words and Spelling Words in a Fun Way.

Free Alphabet Flashcards - D'Nealian and Zaner Bloser

Sometimes the students learning letter recognition just need to see the letter and sometimes they need to see a picture as well. These free D'Nealian Alphabet Flashcards and free Zaner Bloser Alphabet flashcards are perfect for any student learning the letters of the alphabet in the classroom or at home. Teachers can use these free flash cards for kids as a quick letter recognition test for their ABC's. Alphabet flashcards are great for students in Pre-K, Kindergarten, First Grade, and Second Grade. Most primary learners can use these flash cards to see and practice the D'Nealian and Zaner Bloser fonts.

Free Printable Alphabet Flash Cards - Click Here

• D'Nealian Alphabet Letter Flash Cards - Free printable Dnealian alphabet letter flashcards. You can download these printable flash cards for free in Black and White, Color, or with a Color Picture.
• Zaner Bloser Alphabet Letter Flash Cards - Free printable Zaner Bloser alphabet letter flashcards. You can download these printable flash cards for free in Black and White, Color, or with a Color Picture.
• Initial Sounds Flash Cards - Free D'Nealian flashcards that show a colored picture along with a word that represents the initial sound of the picture. Great for teaching initial sounds and beginning sounds of words and vocabulary.
  

Build Vocabulary with Word Lists and Word Walls

Building better vocabulary skills is essential for building better readers. From phonics and phonemic awareness to decoding words and spelling, vocabulary is important for all students.
Below you will find free teacher resources including free themed word walls, free vocabulary word lists, free dolch sight word list, and much more. Enjoy!
Free Word Lists for Teachers in the Classroom and Homeschool Parents:

• Compound Word List - Here is a 16 page list of compound words. Over 2,000 compound words in all in alphabetical order.
• Digraph Word List - Here is a consonant digraph word list and a vowel digraph word list.
• Dolch Noun Word List - Dolch's complete list of 99 common nouns.
• Dolch Sight Word List - Sight words for preprimer, primer, first, second, and third. These levels are sometimes represented as reading levels or grade levels.
• Fry 300 Sight Word List - Fry's sight words include 300 of the most common words used in the reading.

Free Word Walls for Teachers in the Classroom and Homeschool Parents:

Choose a word wall by theme:

• Color Word Wall Theme, Number Word Wall Theme, Number Words Word Wall Theme, Plane Shapes and Solid Figures Word Wall Theme, School Subjects Theme

Free Phonics Worksheets and Lanuage Arts Worksheets

I would like to send out a big THANK YOU for all the Kindergarten, First Grade, and Second Grade teachers who spend so much time working with our young students with phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, spelling, and reading comprehension. In a computer and video game era, it seems hard to motivate kids to read. Below you will find phonics worksheets, alphabetical order worksheets and abc order worksheets, grammar, language arts, and parts of speech worksheets, and spelling worksheets and activities.

• Free ABC Order Worksheets - These alphabetical order worksheets are great for learning dictionary skills. Students can learn abc order by the first letter, second letter, and third letter.
• Free Grammar and Language Arts Worksheets - Here you will find 5 different worksheets teaching synonyms. A synonym is a word that means the same or similar as another word. These worksheets are fun, colorful, and engaging. Students can create a story and draw a picture.
• Free Parts of Speech Worksheets - Click this link to get free noun worksheets and free verb worksheets to help teach the parts of speech in a fun and interesting way.
• Free Phonics Worksheets - Here you will find free worksheets for Beginning Sounds, Ending Sounds, Blends, Vowel worksheets and Consonant worksheets.
• Free Spelling Worksheets and Spelling Activities - Spelling Soup is a fun daily spelling activity for studying spelling words. You will also find here a spelling vocabulary worksheet template where students write their spelling word, definition, and they can draw a picture of the word.

I would also like to offer you some Have Fun Teaching songs that may help with a phonics or language arts lesson that you are teaching:

• The Adjective Song
• Subject and Predicate Song
• The Simile Song
• The Verb Rap Song

Free Themed Border Writing Paper

Hey everyone, I hope you had an amazing and restful weekend and that you are ready to begin another amazing week.

I would like to invite you all to please post a comment or two on the Have Fun Teaching Blog. This will help me know who I am communicating with and I can start to become a little more personal with you as a community. Just click the "comments" button at the bottom of each individual post. Thank you so much!
Hopefully you enjoyed the free handwriting practice worksheets the other day. So, now that you have worked on your handwriting...it's time to stretch those hand muscles and begin writing sentences, paragraphs, stories, and essays!

• Free Theme Border Writing Paper - Butterfly Theme Paper, Christmas Theme Paper, Fish Theme Paper, Frog Theme Paper, Pumpkin Theme Paper, St. Patrick's Day Theme Paper, Thanksgiving Theme Paper, Valentine's Day Theme Paper
• Free Shape Books for Writing Lesson - Apple Shape Book, Barn Shape Book, Boy Shape Book, Computer Shape Book, Flower Shape Book, Girl Shape Book, and House Shape Book
• Free Writing Learning Activity Centers - Create your own comic strip story activity, Draw-A-Story primary writing activity, Draw-A-Story intermediate writing activity, and Stamp-A-Story writing activity

Learning Activity Centers

After teaching 2nd grade, 3rd grade, and now 5th grade I can honestly say that Learning Activity Centers are amazing! Learning centers, if used effectively, can eliminate behavior problems in the classroom and make learning fun, motivating, and meaningful.
I am currently using centers with my 5th grade math class. I have four different homeroom classes each day. Each class is split up into 6 groups with 3-4 students in each small group. The students rotate between two different centers each day, spending 25 minutes at each center. An effective classroom with learning centers consists of students doing 85% of the working and talking while the teacher is guiding them the other 15%. It is great when you leave work feeling stress-free and energetic! Here are some examples of the small group learning centers that you would see in my classroom on a typical week:

1. Fast Math Center - This is a computer math game that students play to learn math facts.
2. FCAT Practice Center - This is a center where students get practice with the Florida standardized test called the FCAT.
3. Enrichment Center - This center is basically taking their homework worksheets and creating a extra enrichment activity to go along with it, something "hands-on".
4. Problem Solving Center - This learning center has math word problems for students to solve.
5. FCAT Explorer Center - This small group center has students working on an online testing practice website for the Florida state test.
6. Manipulatives Center - This center has students working with their hands to make math come alive by using building blocks, math tools, rulers, graphs, 3D shapes, etc.

Below you will find links to Free Have Fun Teaching Learning Activity Centers for your students in the classroom, and also to teach your own kids and children at home:

• Tick Tock Time Center - This is a free telling time learning center. Tick Tock Time is a fun game for students learning to tell time and read a clock using intervals of One Hour, Half Hour, Quarter Hour and also Elapsed Time


• BINGO Games - Free BINGO games for your classroom. Games include Alphabet Bingo, Telling Time Bingo, Noun Words Bingo, Numbers Bingo, and Subtraction Bingo


• Word Family Fun Learning Center - Students can work in small groups to play this fun phonics word family game. Word families include letter combinations, vowels, and consonants that are found in many words such as AD, AN, AT, AY, EAT, ED, ET, IGHT, ING, IP, IT, OLD, OP, OW, OY, UCK, UN, UNNY, and UT


• Long Vowel Sounds Center - This learning activity center includes picture cards and long vowel a, long vowel e, long vowel i, long vowel o, and long vowel u sound cards. Students must match the correct picture card to the corresponding long vowel card. This is a great phonics activity for primary grades.

Check out the Have Fun Teaching Website for more learning centers, games, small group activities, and fun lesson plans for your classroom.

Free D'nealian Handwriting and Zaner Bloser Handwriting Worksheets

Free Handwriting Worksheets. As a fifth grade teacher, I am really beginning to see the importance of early handwriting intervention. When I taught second and third grade I just figured that they were still learning handwriting procedures so I didn't see too much concern. However, when I see poor handwriting in the 5th grade, it becomes a much more serious problem.

Yes, the picture above is a REAL picture of when people used to actually sit down and write a letter to another person. How much longer will our society require the need for writing? When we are at the checkout counter at the grocery store we swipe a card and push in our pin number...When we read newspapers and books, we must remember that they were all typed and revised on a computer by pressing buttons with our fingers on a keyboard...When we write a letter it is by way of email...It seems that the only people writing anymore are the students at school.


With all of that said...SHARPEN YOUR PENCILS...and get ready for some awesome handwriting practice!!!! Even though your your students may never write after high school, it is still important to learn the art of proper handwriting techniques. A journal is a good use of handwriting...(except for the fact that you are currently reading an online blog journal that I am typing with my fingers)

Just click the links below for free dnealian handwriting worksheets and free zaner bloser handwriting worksheets. Each worksheet has upper case and lower case letters.

• Free Printable D'Nealian Handwriting Worksheets
• Free Printable Zaner Bloser Handwriting Worksheets - Some people spell it Zaner-Blozer.

Each handwriting font has the letter a, letter b, letter c, letter d, letter e, letter f, letter g, letter h, letter i, letter j, letter k, letter l, letter m, letter n, letter o, letter p, letter q, letter r, letter s, letter t, letter u, letter v, letter w, letter x, letter y, and letter z.