Ta-dah! You have a Nonsense Word Highway. Start your engines and see how far you can get in one minute. It’s been a classroom favorite for years now and it’s so simple. Anyone can do this!
(If you want to check it out, I have a differentiated freebie for this activity too. Just click on the picture above.)
I use these mini Jenga-like building pieces,
write nonsense words on the wood pieces and have my kinders read them as they retrieve them from the tower. Say it correctly and you get to keep the stick. Say it incorrectly and it goes on top the tower.
Of course you have seen my iceberg pals and how I use them to jump form nonsense iceberg to nonsense iceberg.
Often, I have the kids play the role of penguin or polar bear and do the hopping from iceberg to iceberg for a kinesthetic twist. (Do you love the toe socks or what?)
This is easy to do for any theme. This one I used for spring and told them they were bunnies jumping. Just get whatever seasonal foamie you can find.
How about filling your sensory table with green rice for St. Pat’s Day and having your kindergarteners search for nonsense gold?
(They’re old PTO tokens that were going to be thrown out! Now they’re gold!) Don’t have any old PTO tokens hand on any gold pieces? No worries, I can set you up with this St. Pat’s freebie that will do the trick.
So kick the “nonsense words are boring” rut and spice up your routine a bit. Of course, there are tons of other activities I do such as this card game
but these are just a few that I actually had a few pictures readily available. I’d love to hear back from you all to hear what you do to spice up your nonsense word work. So drop me a note.
LOVE this, Marsha!
Jennifer
First Grade Blue SKies
Great ideas that I plan to use in my RTI group! Thanks!
I always love your ideas! Thank you for sharing with us! Where are the nonsense cards you posted at the end with the penguin extra cards?
We do a whole group activity with dry erase boards. I saw this several years back and do it every year! We sit around the perimeter of our mat and each child has a dry erase board and marker, I start out with a CVC word, such as cat. We all write cat. Then the child next to me tells us which letter to erase (at first we only erase the first or last letter, not the vowel) and then they tell us what letter to write in it’s place. They love to say z. So we erase c and replace it with z. We slowly sound out the new word and decide if it’s a real word or nonsense. If it’s a nonsense word (which it usually is), we sing this song (tune Here we go loop de lou) WE CAN MAKE NONSENSE WORDS. WE CAN MAKE NONSENSE WORDS. wE CAN MAKE NONSENSE WORDS, THEY’RE SILLY AND MEAN NOTHING TOO, We then erase another letter and replace, sing and everyone has a turn, We are now changing the vowel and using ‘the h bothers’. I think this originally came from Heidi Songs. My love doing this.