Swap Meet - A Product Swap Blog Hop and Giveaway

Hello and welcome to the first Swap Meet! Product Swap Blog Hop and Giveaway.  I am so happy to be co-hosting with Melanie from Momma with a Teaching Mission.   We, along with 14 other teachers, have swapped a product with another teacher and used it with our students. The point of these posts and this blog hop is to share with you are reviews of each of the products.  This is your chance to get a look at a product in action and see if it might be right for your students.  So, lets get started shall we?

I am sharing a product from Melanie at Momma with a Teaching Mission.  I "met" Melanie through Facebook groups and our mutual love of creating products.  She has a store full  amazing products that you can find {HERE}

For the swap I was looking for something to use with my firsties during Guided Reading right now and this fit the bill.

What I initially loved about this product was that it was very simple and clean.  There are few graphics and the font is very easy to read.  These are selling points for me in a world where a lot of worksheets or printables have a lot of clip art and great fonts that aren't always practical for the first graders reading them.  This is what the pages look like.  There are two options:

With any product it is important to figure out just how it will work for your students and I did the same with this product.  I used these passages with 2 students in particular that are reading really well for 2 months into first grade.  We used the passages to work on 3 different skills, which are highlighted in the pictures below.

On Day 1 we did a read through with one of my favourite reading tools - reading lights.  Each girl had a different reading passage and were simply reading to understand the text.  You can see that we also used my decoding strategies wands.  These are the strategies the girls are working on right now to decode words.  Keeping the wands right in sight helps them to remember what to try when they get stuck on a word.

After our read through their first task was to go through the text again and circle all of our word wall words.  This is not something that Melanie suggests in her product but it is one of my go-to activities if we are using printable passages.  On the following day we focused on searching for word families and they used a yellow highlighter to highlight word families .

Next, we moved to the comprehension piece.  Each passage comes with 2 comprehension questions. In most cases both questions can be answered using text evidence, although some require the students to infer or make a connection.  I was specifically looking for passages with answers found in the text. My students used another colour of highlighter and highlighted words or phrases that answered the question they were answering.  I have to add here that any chance to use highlighters is such a motivator too.  I love to highlight the evidence in the text to make it very concrete for my students and it is not as possible when teaching with a book (although highlighting tape is an option within the text).  Not pictured is the work we did on our last meeting when they looked at the highlights and wrote a sentence to answer the question.  We did not use the second version of the passage with short and long vowel sorting because we haven't worked enough on that skill.  I will pull these passages out again later on with a new group of students and we will use the sorting page.  It is great that it is an included option.

I highly recommend her passages for all the reasons I have stated.  My students loved the stories and were able to personally connect to the topics that they had - a birthday and things to do with friends. Check them out if you are looking for passages to use with your first graders at the beginning of the year.

Now that you know all about Melanie's product how would you like to win it?  As part of our blog hop we are giving 1 lucky winner all 16 products - that is over $90.00 in K-3 products.  My Mystery Letter is below and it is super simple to enter.  Find my entry in the rafflecopter below and follow the instructions.  After you have entered, scroll down to find the link to hop to the next blog and hear about another great product.

a Rafflecopter giveaway