On Our Way!
We are on our way to developing excellent first grade routines! It's been an adjustment to get used to the first grade blocks of time for reading, writing, math, and Daily 5 (our literacy block where I teach guided reading and the students are with a teacher, or independently practicing skills). We are still rolling out all the how-to's for these times in our day, but I feel like the students are settling in. One of our biggest goals right now is to learn how to listen and focus on the teacher or other speaker during group time. The students will hear me say "Let me see all 5 things for whole body listening".
This means:
1. eyes are watching the speaker
2. ears are listening to the speaker
3. mouth is quiet when it is not your turn
4. hands are in our laps to keep focused and not bother others
5. feet are like pretzels (criss cross)
You can help reinforce good conversation and speaking/listening skills by ensuring your child takes turns in conversations at home, not interrupting, and establishing eye contact.
We have been working REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hard this week at learning how to do the Daily 5 Read to Self station. This is where readers practice their skills at their own reading level. It is important that time is set aside each day to develop a love of reading and grow in skill level. It takes a lot of work to build stamina to read independently as a 5, 6, 7 year old for 15-20 minutes at a time!! We've been graphing our individual progress----some days are up, some days are down....but we've been doing so well, Mrs. Powell didn't turn the timer off yesterday, and we made it 26 minutes!!! YAHOOOOOO!!!! This is amazing!
Please, please, please remember, however - that even though your child can read by themselves, it doesn't mean that they always should! It is critical to their reading development that they read with you, read to you, and still have you read to them! They need support, and they need to hear a fluent reader in order to become a fluent reader!
Here is Kendra, being an expert at Read to Self. We made a poster with her modeling all the correct reading behaviors we should see during Daily 5!
This week, our focus story was Chester's Way. You can watch it here!
We will be working a little more with this story next week. We started in our reading journals, and wrote/drew about the main character and other characters in the story. The class really seemed to like their interactive notebooks! Here is a sample from Emma's notebook.
We also read this story and listened closely for words we didn't recognize. We practiced asking questions about unknown words. Some of the words our class did not know were: croquet, disguise, miniature, diagonal, rarely, and duplicated. After we talked about these words, Camdon noticed that "we have 2 girls in our class that are duplicated'! It was so cute! I couldn't have asked for a better example at just the right time!
We've also been working on building, reading, and writing short a words A LOT this week! We're getting the hang of building our words on word mats at the group area. Ask your child how we stretch our words with a "rubber band" before we build or write them.
Lastly, in math we are working on representing numbers in a variety of ways. Starting with numbers 1-10, we are learning to show it with circle drawings (dots), tallies, pictures, what comes before/after the focus number, if it is even/odd, and how to break it down into its parts (called a number bond or math mountain). We will continue this work next week. As we build number sense, we will begin to add/subtract within 5.
Whew!! We've been busy, and we are not even done yet! Bring on Friday---we are ready!
