A few things that I love from Scholastic....

Since March is my birthday month, I'm trying to focus on things that I love or that make my life just a little bit easier. I love Scholastic for their picture books. The illustrations are pretty hard to beat and the prices aren't horrible if you can hit a clearance (or find them at Goodwill). The thing that I often forget about is are their teacher products. Frankly, I blame this on the fact that the website highlights so many worksheet books. I try to avoid using worksheets with my elementary students (though I used quite a few for my middle school case load). However, I couldn't resist digging through their books during the most recent Dollar Days sale. It was worth it.

Several teachers recommended looking into this book over the past three years. I can certainly see why now that I have used it with my students.

The poems are perfect for articulation therapy at the reading level. They are short, but loaded with great sound targets. Even my most reluctant reader asked to read three of the poems. I printed out the entire book and marked the ones that will see frequently use.

The story skit book is another articulation purchase. I have a few students that enjoy expressing themselves through acting and this is a great outlet. The stories are loaded with their target sounds and include a word list after each skit.

The great thing about both of these books is that I can also incorporate them into language activities. The authors provide some great new vocabulary words for our lessons.

Word Ladders have been a passion of mine since I used them at my graduate school internship in the prison system. They are a great way to work on segmenting and blending sounds. It also brings up great opportunities to learn new vocabulary words and use some inferencing to figure out the next word from the clues.