An active and innovative approach to making words that teachers and their students have grown to love is finally here! Based on its highly successful parent text, Phonics They Use , this new grade-level series Making Words offers teachers a fresh multi-level activity and lesson series written for the kindergarten through fifth grade classroom. Pat Cunningham and Dottie Hall present classroom teachers with effective tools for strengthening phonics and spelling skills that encourage students to move beyond learning and into a world of word discovery. Each research-based volume includes a wealth of friendly, hands-on, manipulative activities that guide teachers in teaching the development of words--from phonemic awareness to spelling. In Making Words First Grade, Pat and Dottie introduce first grade teachers to100 lessons that teach all the phonics, spelling, and phonemic awareness skills included in most first grade curriculums. Each Making Words activity leads children through a systematic and sequential phonics curriculum. All lessons include practice with the phonemic awareness skills of segmenting and blending as children stretch out words they are making and blend the letters to make new words. Because teaching children letter-sound relationships is easier than teaching children to actually use these letter-sound relationships, all lessons include a transfer step in which children apply the sounds they are learning to spelling new words. Making Words First Grade is the best resource you can have on hand for motivating your students to learn words! Features 100 fun and interactive lessons for building phonemic awareness, phonics, and spelling skills. Presents a concise method for involving students in the process of identifying phonological units and patterns within words. Promotes student awareness of similarities in words that helps develop writing skills. Includes reproducible letter tiles, record sheets for each lesson, and take-home sheets to copy, cut, and/or laminate. Highlights a list of useful children's books to extend the Making Words lesson.