easy Word Work routines and lesson plans for Making Words in 1st grade

Do you have word work routines when making words in your primary classroom?  It’s one of my favorite ways to do word building, and practice spelling and decoding skills with kinders and first graders!  But what I DON’T love about word work is all of the letter cards to pass out and keep up with.  It always took me more time to pass out cards than to do the actual lesson!  So when we finally started doing our making words routines digitally, it was SO much better!

Today we’ll be talking about our word work routines, how to use DIGITAL making words mats, and I’ll walk you through an entire sample lesson!

Types of Making Words Mats

After I gave up on passing out letter cards, I used two different kinds of mats: dry erase boards and digital.  I love both types for different reasons!

Let’s talk about the dry erase mats first!  I’ve used just plain dry erase boards and had kids spell words with me as I give the clues.  But just a blank dry erase board isn’t quite structured enough for the little kids.  It’s hard for them to easily see where the new letters go. 

Laminated dry erase mats are a much better option!  Just pass out the laminated mats and dry erase markers and they use these just like a dry erase board.  I like to use the mats with the Elkonin boxes to help give the kids structure for where to write their words.  These making words lesson plans have 4 options of mats though with and without letters and Elkonin boxes.

If you’re ready to go all digital with your word work routines, or want to continue making words with Google classroom, digital mats are perfect!

You can manipulate the letters by clicking and dragging so it makes a great alternative to the traditional letter cards.  Digital mats can also be used on iPads or in Google classroom.  They can also be used on your interactive white board if you just want to do the activity all together as a whole group!

 

Making Words Routines

These word work routines are quick and predictable in our classroom.  Just like my Super Phonics lessons and routines, each making words lesson plan is basically the same with different content or word.  So the kids pick up the routine quickly and it just gets smoother and quicker as the year goes on!

There is at least one making words lesson for each of my first grade Super Phonics units.  I try to work these in as a whole group lesson a couple times a week at the beginning of the year when we need more whole group activities and then as the year goes on, we do less of this as a whole class, and more of it in small group interventions.

Here are the basic making words routines (and it’s outlined in detail in the video below):

• Go over the letter names and sounds of each letter in the lesson
• Build a starting word
• You give them the new word and the kids have to figure out the letter or letters to substitute to build that word
• You give them the letters to substitute and the kids have to figure out what the word is
• Guess my word: You give students clues about a longer (usually 2-syllable) word to spell with the feature sound

You can watch my full explanation and model of a blends and digraphs making words lesson in this video.

You can find a free sample of these word building lessons here and the bundle for an entire year of these word work routines here.