Today the “extra duties as assigned” part of my contract obliged me to visit our 1st grade classroom to deal with some technology drama. I love going out there to see what the littles are up to. Today they were building their spelling words with unifix cubes. Each group was drawing from a big bin of cubes, color coded by letter. When everyone in the group had their word formed, the color coding helped them quickly compare with their neighbors and confer about discrepancies. “Blurt” was particularly controversial as some students thought the orange cubes were b’s and others thought the red ones were. (Spoiler: The red cubes were d’s.)
I enjoyed a lot of aspects of this activity, but I think for young kids it works particularly well because it separates spelling from hand-writing, allowing those who struggle with fine motor to focus on one skill at a time.
How did you and your family make your day more colorful today?