P is for. . . Pizza Word Family Activity

Cristi from Through the Calm and Through the Storm and Meg from Adventures with Jude are hosting this great weekly party called Blogging Through the Alphabet. All are welcome to join in, just make sure to keep your posts family-friendly. I am determined to stay faithful this time around. I might not always post on the same day of the week, but I have every intention to post something each week.

Here is how I decided my "theme" for this round of Blogging Through the Alphabet. As I was going through old blog posts recently, I noticed I have some neat ideas for activities and crafts that I did with in the past. Unfortunately, I always included them in my weekly wrap up posts or more recently in Poppins Book Nook posts, so they sort of got buried. I can't really share them as individual activities or create pinnable images to promote them and share my ideas, which is why I started this blog in the first place (to share my ideas with others who work with children). So, I am going to make new posts for these ideas.

I have found there is a huge benefit in this strategy. I am remembering  ideas that I had forgotten, which means I can now do these activities with the younger children. I will be sharing the old pictures and possibly sharing new pictures of the younger children participating.

I used to enjoy coming up with fun activities for the girls to practice reading using word families. Several years ago we were doing a pizza unit and I came up with these.

P is for. . . Pizza Word Family Activity

In order to make these I took brown construction paper and cut out 8 pizza slice shapes. Then I took white paper, cut in the same shape but with the crust cut off. I then colored a tiny bit red for the sauce and the rest yellow for the cheese.

I knew I wanted to start with the short a vowel family words so I decided to cut out some pink paper to represent ham (short vowel word). Then I made a list of words for each family (at, am, an, ap, ack, ab, ag, and ad) and wrote them on the ham pieces. 

I placed them in a bowl and grabbed a die out of a game we have.

In order to play the game we took turns rolling the die and counting out the number of toppings rolled. Then we sounded out the words one at a time and placed them on the pizza. The first ham piece got placed on any pizza slice. Then for the following pieces we would see if the word rhymed with any that were already on the pizza. If they rhymed they got placed on the same slice. If they didn't rhyme they got placed on a new slice.

As there is no winner or loser in this game it is fun for the children. They get to listen for rhyming words and because the rhyming words are all on the same slice the children can see the similarities. 

I had every intention of creating toppings for the other vowels, but I never got to it. I think when we get to the letter P this time around, I am going to do this again. Here were my ideas for the toppings to go with the other vowels:

Short e-pepperoni

Short i- olives

Short o- broccoli

Short u- mushroom