Do You Want Fries With That?

So when I told my sweeties we would be working with french fries today, they about flipped out of their seats.  They were soooo excited!  Of course, I had to eventually burst their bubble and let them know that we were not using REAL french fries, just paper ones.  They were a little disappointed, but they recovered quickly.  A while ago, I saw an idea for long i french fries over at First Grader At Last

I thought this was a great idea for sorting long I words.  When I did it today, I didn't put labels on the fry boxes.  Instead, I handed them 3 fry boxes, the fries with the words on them, and 3 sticky notes.  I asked them to work with their small group and decide how to sort and group the words.  Then, they were to label each box with the sticky notes according to how they sorted them.  The kids had a lot of fun sorting and most of them were able to sort the words fairly quickly.  Look at their concentration and focus:

 She sees a camera and smiles - what can I say?

The only thing that gave them some trouble was the igh spelling.  I had words like might, flight, sigh, and high.  Some of them wanted to label that box "i", "gh" or "ight".  This brought about some amazing conversations and some in-depth teaching about looking at and analyzing words.  Yes, this lesson took WAAAYYY more time that I had expected, but it was worth it.  If you get the chance, try it out.  But beware - my kids wanted to take the fries and boxes home with them!