Word Work and Chinese New Year

First of all, it is REALLY cold here in Tennessee, and we have snow tonight!  AND we have a SNOW DAY tomorrow!  It is the perfect day for it!  We need a nice, long 4-day weekend!  Anyway, I wanted to show you what I do for word work and at teacher table.  I have created 3 different word work packets so far for my classroom, and I have posted them in my TPT store.  I am ALL about word sorts.  I cannot stress enough that these are ESSENTIAL!  They make such the difference in test scores.  Below is one of the activities that contains a word sort and works on making sentences with the words.  {By the way, these go well with the 2nd grade Treasures Reading Series.}

These are the word mats we use.  I put them on construction paper and then laminate them for weekly use. 

You can also have them form their words with playdough.  They love doing that on their word mats.  I use the word cards below to put in my pocket chart, as well.  

There is always a board game included, too.  This is a class favorite!  They have to read and spell the words.

You can click below to see them in my store and download any previews for free!

We celebrated the Chinese New Year really early at our school this year.  We had a family night at school and had about 7 stations set up with different activities.  It was a huge success!  I was so proud of our school family!  Of course, I did not plan ahead, and the batteries in my camera went dead.  {Doesn't that always happen when you need your camera the most?!}

This was the fish painting station.  We wanted to get real fish to paint, but the fakes worked out great!

Rayann and I had the cherry blossom collage station.  You put a drop of ink on the paper, and then the kids blow through straws to move the ink.  It was so cool!  It looked like real tree branches.  Then, we used pink tissue paper to make the cherry blossoms.  I wish I had taken a picture, but they looked sort of like this one:

There were also these stations:

-storytime

-Sumi-e painting

-make a fortune cookie out of felt and create a fortune

-paper lanterns

-chopstick station {a big hit} 

We had so much fun! 

Have a great Friday!