Spelling technique that my kids loved

Hi!  I was doing my AAS lesson with my 6yo the other day and came up with another way to have him spell with the tiles. It is super simple, but he thinks it is amazing.  It reinforces a science concept, also.  I thought I would share, in case someone else's kids might like it! 

I pulled out all of the tiles that we were going to need for his spelling words.  (We are on word cards 131-140 on level one, but it would work with any lesson.)  I clustered all the letters together.  I drew a big cloud around the group of letters.  Then , I drew raindrops coming out of the cloud.  I drew grass for the "ground."   I told him "the letters are raindrops in the cloud.  The cloud is going to rain down words."  I told him to spell the word "bank."  He found the letters in the cloud and pretended that the letters were "raining" down onto the grass.  He built that word and read it as usual.  Then I told him that the letters needed to evaporate back into the cloud.  So, he "evaporated" the letters back into the clouds.  Then, I told him a new words is going to condense.  The new word is "thank."  Then he completed the process with each of his words.  At the end, I had him place every letter in the cloud back into the apporpriate place in the alphabet.  I reognize that having the kids return the letters helps with lots of things, but it was taking too long to do it with every word.  I felt like this was a good compromise. 

I did this with my 8yo on Level 2, also.  He liked it, also!

Jennifer