time, students are allowed to choose the words from the card that they would like to work on that day.
at the beginning of the year, i like to build a nice base of paper/pencil activities that the students become familiar with. i get the activities from this amazing free resource.... i like to develop the paper/pencil tasks first because the whole class can work on them at the same time.
the other more paper-based activity that we start in the first few weeks of word work is interactive notebooks for phonics and word sorts. my students have a very general "reading notebook" where we put all of their phonics interactive notebook 