CKLA Skills 5-7 Spelling Trees in 1st Grade: Student Recording Sheets That Work!

CKLA Skills spelling trees have always helped my students understand that different words have different spellings for sounds. Some years I have made leaves that my students place on the trees. Other times they tell me the branch and spell it, while I record it on our tree. 

I use to have my students make trees along with me, but that was always tricky. I found that they couldn't fit the words any sheet that had premade leaves, because they were always too small. 

One year I had them draw their own leaves. However, that took too a lot longer and was very frustrating for some students.

I wanted them to create a book they would actually access and use for independent writing. 

So this year we used a spelling alternatives book!

The spellings with the largest power bar, or the most common spelling, have the largest space. 

One of the hardest parts of using a tree was that my students would think of a lot of extra words as the year went on. I could add them to my tree, but they never had space for them on their own trees. 

In this spelling alternatives book, each sound is double sided, so your students can continue to add to it throughout the year.

This book was a huge success in class this year. Whenever it was time to make a new tree they were excited, which was a BIG change from the previous years!

Many of my students would get this book when they were working on independent writing in Skills and Knowledge. 

Click here for a closer look at this spelling tree resource!

Looking for print and play activities to enhance all the letter sounds and tricky words from Skills 1? Click here to read about what I use!