Reading Workshop
1. Mini-Lesson The mini-lesson is focused on a strategy that good readers do, not matter what level they are reading at! Here are the teaching points for this unit! - We look at the pictures, remember what the story was about and then we READ the pictures and words. - We match the words we say with the pictures on the page - We make our own favorite story books by asking adults to read the same book over and over again. - We talk like the characters - We remember more and more of the story the more we read our favorite storybooks - We use special words to jon the pages together (and, then, later, after) - We read more and more exact words - We find, point to, and read some of the words 2. Guided Practice on the carpet This can look like students turning and talking to their learning partner about a page in a book I read, or students coming up and reading a book like a storyteller, ect. | 3. Independent reading time Time to read! We are building up our independent reading stamina and are at 6 min! By the end of the year, we could be reading for 15-20 min. The more we read, the more we learn! 4. Partner Reading Time This is where we get to take what we learned and share it with our partner. Maybe we are sharing a WOW page that we found in our book or maybe we are sharing a connection to our own life we found in the text. |
Word workshop
Every year we dive in and practice the alphabet (names, sounds, handwriting). This is review for some and new learning for others. Regardless, it is a great community activity where students are all learning it in the same way. The way we learn each letter is a big anchor to the rest of our learning and something we don't want them to miss. We have a guiding curriculum to help us intentionally teach the alphabet in a way that is best for our young readers. Reading Horizons is a phonics/phonemic awareness based curriculum that also has an online component for assessment and practice of new skills.
Students progress through the alphabet in a non-alphabetic order and learn each letter by seeing, saying, and writing each letter. We are intentionally teaching all three components to instruct proper letter formation right from the start! You may be noticing a lot of handwriting papers coming home! This is an important part of our instruction right now. I am first modeling proper formation, everyone practices on whiteboards, and then they are taking all they learned and applying it to pencil and paper. This extra practice will help them transfer proper letter formation into their writing during writing workshop. If you find your child is coming home with unfinished work or work where the letters do not stay in the lines it is okay. A lot of practice in short increments of time will help build these skills.
Alongside see, saying, and writing the letters, we are learning an animal friend that helps us remember the sounds each letter makes. For example when we learned about the letter A students turned their bodies into Allie Alligator, and for B, Bubba Bear. This alphabet chart is in their writing folder as a tool to help them when they are stretching out words. It really does help!
The letters we have learned so far are A & B. With one consonant and one vowel we have learned how to slide sounds together. Your child is able to use the strategy of the slide in not only writing but reading too! When they see a BA slide they are able to use this strategy to push the two sounds together and make the /ba/ sound as in /bat/. These are the beginning stages of teaching young learners how to look at words and decode them, even if they are not real words (nonsense words).
writing workshop animal alphabet. docx |
Interactive Read Alouds
We strive to do at least 2 read alouds a day! The books we choose typically focus on Social Emotional skills that we are reinforcing or books that invoke lots of questions and deep thinking. Our goal as a K team this year is to do more informational text read alouds! We have subscribed to time for kids and will be reading it aloud together once a week :) We will also be reading chapter books aloud to the class to help develop long range comprehension and deep character analysis. |