Making Words & Sammies! {Freebie!!!}

With the school days winding down, the kids are getting antsy.  So when that happens, I pull out the Box Cars activities.  Today's fun is called "Word Shapes".  This game has the students rolling letters and trying to build words.  But they need to be strategic!  The slots are shaped for tall, small, and fall letters and the student must think about words they know and if certain consonants can be found at the beginning or the end.  Middle slots should be saved for vowels . . . but not always.

First the students are divided into pairs and given a 30-sided dice with vowels, consonants and four wilds.  We got ours from BoxCars and One-Eyed Jacks but you could also have the kids pull letters from a bag. 

The students take turns rolling (or pulling) and write a letter in the appropriate box, depending on the shape.  Once a letter is placed, it cannot be moved.  The first student to make 3 words, WINS! 

Here's the FREEBIE!

Click on the image below for your very own set of this game.  Just in case you can't get your hands on the 30-sided dice, I also included a set of letter and word cards.  You may want to make the consonants blue, the vowels red, and the wilds green.  I copied the Word Shapes sheet out on colorful paper and laminated.  The students use a dry-erase marker to complete the activity.

And last week, I finally decided how I wanted to use the Sandwich Coasters I found at Dollar Tree (thanks to Krista at The Creative Chalkboard).  I used Avery labels to give each ingredient a money value.  I kept the amounts easy to calculate, for now.

Bread:  25 cents

Ham:  75 cents

Bacon:  75 cents

Swiss Cheese:  50 cents

Cheddar Cheese:  50 cents

Lettuce: 50 cents

Onion:  25 cents

Tomato: 50 cents 

I partnered the class up and gave them a dry-erase board and a set of ingredients and told them they would be working in a sandwich shop today.  To take the sandwich shop idea even further, you may want to provide aprons and food-prep gloves for the class as they make the sandwich!

The rest is simple.  Give the class an "order".  They need to make the sandwich and calculate how much it will be.  Here are a few shots of what my kids were doing to figure out how much each sandwich would cost.

 

I just LOVED how this group combined prices to make a $1.00 to make adding everything else up easier.

After the kids get comfortable, you could tell them that the customer only has a certain amount of money to spend.  Their job is to come up with sandwich combinations that total that amount. 

That's all for now!

~Stacy