Phonics instruction and literacy centers
Students take part in a variety of phonics and and phonemic awareness instruction. Through whole group instruction and small groups, students engage with letters, associated sounds, phonemic awareness skills such as rhyming, blending onset and rime, segmenting syllables, isolating sounds etc. and lastly high-frequency words.
Writer's Workshop
Our class has taken on "Writer's Workshop" this year to help foster a love for writing. Knowing that writing and reading go hand in hand, our intention is to bring joy to both subjects for our students so that can construct their own understanding of these subjects with enthusiasm and passion. Writing in early childhood can be a challenging task, but with Writer's Workshop, our students are loving the creativity and freedom they have with their learning. Currently students are working on labeling their drawings with phonetic spelling. The videos below were taken at a time when we were focusing on adding details to our drawings to help better tell a story.
literature/reading comprehension
During this whole class, reading comprehension lesson, students worked with making predictions about a nonfiction text. Strategies to make predictions were modeled to students in lessons prior and students were then given the opportunity to apply their skills independently in a guided practice with the lead teacher. Students used components such as the title, pictures on the front and back cover of the text and their schema to help provide evidence for their predictions. Students were asked to not only make predictions about the nonfiction text, but to also give their reasoning.
During this literature lesson, students learned about their "schema", and how we can add new learning to our schema to help us better understand a topic. For the week of Halloween we read all about pumpkins. Our class not only loved the topic, but loved watching the list of what we added to our schema grow with each new text!