Daily 5 Reading

What a fantastic week we had in first grade.  The kids are learning about our daily 5 reading rotations.  In my classroom, the students will go through a total of 5 reading rotations each and everyday.  The stations include read to self, listen to reading, read to someone, computer reading, work on words,  phonics, and guided reading.  Everyday I will choose one way for students to read:   listen to reading on ipods or cd players, read to self (where they read a variety of books on their individual reading level), or read to someone (where they share a book with a friend).  Also, everyday they will go to a phonics station with Mrs. Healy.  At this group, they will be learning about a variety of phonics skills from our Fundations phonics program.  Then, they will go to  guided reading with myself (Mrs. Hogan).   Your child will be with a group of 5 students reading a book at their instructional reading level.  We will use that book to work on comprehension skills.  Also, your child will rotate to our computer station.  At this station, the students will utilize the 7 computers we have in our classroom to read from a program called MobyMax.  One student that is at the computer station will get to go up and use our Promethean Interactive Board to play a reading game.  Our final rotation is work with words.  This is a station your child will go to work on their sight words.

If this sounds like a lot....it is!!!   This is why we take the first 2 full weeks learning how to go through each of these rotations.  So far, your child has learned about read to self.  They are currently trying to build their independent reading stamina to 15 minutes.  They've learned where they can sit during read to self and the three ways they can read their book (read the words, read the pictures, or retell the story).  On Friday, I introduced read to someone and we got to read to our friends for 4 minutes.  We will work on building our stamina during read to someone too so that we can read with our friends for 15 minutes.  Next week, we will continue working on building stamina in these two areas.  The students will also learn how to use our listen to reading area.  I'm so excited about our rotations and the kids are too.  We are all ready to get them up and running.  It is a slow process, but it is very much worth the time and effort put into getting them running.  It is very important that we use this time to teach how to work at each station so that they run smoothly.

This week, we also began using poems during shared reading to work on our reading fluency.  Reading fluency is being able to read smoothly, with few errors, and still understand what we read.  Here is a cute video of the poem we used this week Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear.

This week, we also began our writer's workshop.  The students are learning how to be an author of their own book.  The students have currently learned how think of something that has happened to them, sketch a picture, and then write words that match their pictures.  I'll write more about our writer's workshop time next week on the blog.

In social studies, the students are learning how to fill someone's bucket.  Filling a bucket is easy...when we do nice things, we make others feel nice and we make ourselves feel good too.  We talked about how sharing with our friends, helping others, playing with our friends, listening to others when they are speaking to us, and greeting others with a friendly hello are all ways we can fill someone's bucket.

This week, we also read the book David Goes to School by David Shannon.  We talked about how we can make smart choices.  The following is an anchor chart of the students ideas on how to make smart choices and be a good student.  They had some great ideas!

Thank you to everyone that has returned the forms from open house and the release forms for our website.  Below I will add some pictures from the first week of school.  Just a reminder that I will not add pictures of those students that did not return a release form.

 

Look at the PERFECT line!!!  What an OWL-some group of firsties I have!

Have a weekend!