Concepts of Print and Play This week we are playing the train game which I found at the Balanced Literacy website. To prepare for the lesson, I made little construction paper freight cars and laminated them. I stocked up on file cards and sticky notepaper. During read aloud, I introduced  the simple big book, I Like Me.  Afterwards we talked about the story and then I asked them what they noticed about the letters on the page. They talked with a partner and then I asked them to share while I wrote down their comments. One thing that T. noticed was that each group of letters had a space between them.       I used his observation and compared it to a train and said that just like a freight car, each group of letters was called a word, and that each word had it's own space and meaning. Then I introduced The T rain Game. Each day I will ask a closed question and their first classroom job will be to write their answer on sticky paper a...