Week of March 23rd - March 27th

I will continue to engage my students in phonics and sight word instruction.

Phonics instruction teaches children the relationships between the letters of written language and the individual sounds of spoken language. It teaches children to use these relationships to read and write words. The goal of phonics instruction is to help children learn and use the alphabetic principle--the understanding that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds. Knowing these relationships will help children recognize familiar words accurately and automatically, and "decode" new words. In short, knowledge of the alphabetic principle contributes greatly to children's ability to read words both in isolation and in connected text.

Here is an example of some activities that will be implemented this week to help promote a strong knowledge of the alphabetic principle:

Students will segment (isolate sounds within a word), judge if two words start the same or end the same, remove a phoneme (smallest sound) from a word, count phonemes in a word, blend sounds together, sound/symbol identification, including knowing the letters by sight and by sound, and matching letters with the appropriate sounds and vice versa, and awareness of sound patterns in the language.

Learning sight words is also an important step in literacy. Readers need to recognize each word as quickly and effortlessly as possible so that they can pay attention to the more mentally demanding task of understanding what they are reading. Students will encounter sight words more frequently than any other words in print and, for this reason, they need to recognize them on sight, and need to read them without hesitation.

Some activities that will be implemented this week to practice sight words include word activities, magnetic letter activities, and writing activities such as "Mind Reader" and "Rainbow Writing."

Mind Reader: Students number their papers 1-5. They listen to clues and write a sight word on each line- hoping to read my mind to find the correct word from our word wall. "It has four letters, rhymes with __, starts with __, ends with __, etc.

Rainbow Writing: Student write a sight word, whispering the correct spelling of the word. Then they trace the word three times with different colored crayons. This creates a fun way to memorize trick words.

Week of March 16th - March 20th

Kindergarten
Students will work with the following rimes: -ut, -ust, -ump, -unk, & ush. They will continue working with the short u vowel sound. They will blend individual sounds into words and they will segment words into individual sounds. Students will also substitute beginning sounds to form new words. Also, we will engage in a read aloud on "Friday Fun-day."

1st Grade
Students will listen to word endings to identify rhyming words. They will listen to words and will identify the final and/or middle sounds. They will review sight words and compound words. Students will also be introduced to the concept of baseword and suffix. Specifically this week, we will work on adding the suffix -s to basewords. The concept of plurals will also be introduced. We will engage in a read aloud on "Friday Fun-day."

2nd Grade
Students will identify final and medial sounds in words. They will add and delete sounds to form new words. They will work on identifying and spelling two syllable words ending in -le and -er. Students will learn about verbs and will practice adding proper verbs to their sentences during journal writing. They will also be engaged in a read aloud on "Friday Fun-day."

Week of March 9th - March 12th

Bridging home and school is very important to me. I am looking forward to conferences this week!

Reminder

After School Reading Club will not meet this week. Classes will resume on Tuesday, March 10, 2009

I will continue to engage students in meaningful reading activities this week. Focus will continue to be on phonemic awareness, word recognition, and reading fluency. Students will be expected to focus on word families and vowel patterns. They will learn decoding strategies and will practice reading leveled books. While reading, students will track words with their fingers and practice various strategies: using context and picture clues to read an unknown word, look at word families or vowel patterns within words, and skip an unknown word to the end of the sentence then go back to the beginning to read it again.