This is a continuation of my literacy favorites. My goal in these posts is to show you how affordable (and fun!) teaching literacy can be. Today, we’ll look at three more things I would have a hard time teaching literacy without.
1. HEAVY DUTY PAPER (index cards, card stock, or sentence strips)
The possibilities with these supplies are truly endless and I have lots of examples…sorry, I just couldn’t contain myself! 
*Flashcards for high frequency words. I like to use remnants of card stock from my Christian Nursery Rhyme books or index cards.
*You can make a deck of cards to play Go Fish, Memory Match, or your favorite card game. I think index cards work best for this, because they are just the right size for little fingers when you cut them in half. You can even buy index cards that are already cut in half for you!
*Label things around your house/classroom with index cards, cut up card stock, or sentence strips . If your child needs to work on handwriting, let him or her write some of the words. Or you can write all the words and your child can help you decide where they need to go. NJoy asks about twice a week to use our pointer to “point to words”. He says each letter of the word, then “reads” the words.
*Cardstock works best for printing FREE online printables (see Part 1).
*To work on onsets and rimes. I like to use index cards for this one, but card stock or sentence strips will also work. I wish I could also find the set of onsets I have from colored index cards. I used them ALL the time in the classroom and have used them some with ALuv to work on word families. It’s the story of my life to lose things these days. If I remember correctly, all the initial consonants were in one color, my blends were in another color, and my digraphs were in another color.
*Sentence strips work nicely to display poems, songs, or other texts in a pocket chart (another literacy favorite that I’ll get to!)
*Any of these heavy duty papers works great for constructing & reconstructing sentences. We use them for our memory versus like Carisa and to reconstruct sentences from a poem, song, or book, like we did in the picture above.
*When ALuv needed some practice with handwriting and I didn’t really want to use handwriting worksheets, I took sentence strips cut them apart. You can click here to see what I did. I really like that the lines on the sentence strip match the lines of the lined paper, except they’re much larger.
*I use those same letters on sentence strips to have him unscramble sight words and match them to the words on the “flashcards” in our pocket chart.
*I use sentence strips to create a linear line for ABC order or a make-shift number line
*You can use any of the heavy duty paper to make words for your word wall (my next literacy favorite). I prefer using sentence strips to model good handwriting. Lately, I’ve even laid aside my type A tendencies to let ALuv write a few words for his Word Wall.
2 A WORD WALL
ALuv’s Word Wall: we currently add 2 words a week
ALuv’s Portable Word Wall: made with a file folder
Waiting in the doctor’s office just recently (sans kids), I was re-reading a chapter from The Art of Teaching Reading by Lucy Calkins. The chapter dealt with word study in the primary grades and she gave quite a bit of emphasis on using a word wall. Lucy says as the children “encounter words repeatedly in the midst of their ongoing reading and writing, they can use the word wall as a tool to help them recall and use conventional spellings.” (pg. 213)
3. LEGOS/DUPLO BLOCKS
(This is only free or “cheap” if you already own an abundance of them!)
*Making words/word shapes with Legos
*Here are a lot of literacy ideas for Legos from Chalk Talk
*Make puzzles with Lego or Duplo blocks (you could really tape on anything, including matching upper and lower case letters)
Thank you for joining This Reading Mama on a literacy journey!
~Becky
[...] If you’re new to this mini-series on my favorite literacy manipulatives and supplies, here is Part 1 & Part 2. [...]