Paint Chip Word Families

I'm sure you've seen them all over Pinterest...paint chip ideas galore! Last week I went to Lowe's to look at paint samples (for a home improvement project) and was thrilled to find paint chips with squares already punched in them!  I thought it would be cute to make something like this, but punching the squares would be kind of time consuming...good news for us, Valspar paint has made it easy! I grabbed a few extra paint samples and headed home to make these:

I fired up my Cricut and cut several letters to create the word families. (The black letters are cut at 1" using the Plantin Schoolbook cartridge.) After they are laminated, I am going to cut them apart on the white line. I made strips of letters for the children to slide behind the square to make words. I haven't created a recording sheet yet, but there are several ways to differentiate this activity. For now, I put the word family on the bottom of the strip, but they could choose any letter strip and see how many real vs. nonsense words they make, practice reading CVC words,  or keep a record the words they read. We all know what an important part onset rime word families play in developing reading and writing skills.

 Thanks for checking in and have a great day!

Polka Dot Apples

Hi! I hope you are enjoying your day! I have just a quick but cute Cricut project to share with you. I am going to stick with my polka dot classroom decorations this year and made a few apples...I'm not sure what I'll use them for yet, but have a few ideas. They would make a cute door decoration or bulletin board accents. So far I've made 8 of them.

I used my Doodlecharms cartridge and cut the apples at 4 and a quarter inches. I cut the shadow out of black. I used the "auto fill" button on my Cricut. If you have not used this feature, you should! It automatically calculates how many images will fit to your paper, in the size that you want.

That's it for today....just a little polka dot fun to share with you! Thanks for checking in and have a great day!