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Literacy: Reading & Writing
Welcome to our reading and writing page!
This is where you will find:
your child's spelling list
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weekly phonics rules
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our reading goals for the term
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reading/writing skills we are focusing on
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literature we are exploring
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Raz-kids information
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home reading information
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helpful hints
Grade One Reading Goals:
Reading Levels:
Jan.-Feb. : E - G
March - April: H-I
Grade Two Reading Goals:
Reading Levels:
Jan.-Feb. : J-L
March - April: L-M
A note about our reading goals:
If your child has not yet reached the expected reading level for this month, there is still time to catch up! Much of the first part of our year, especially in Grade One, is spent on review and laying a strong literacy foundation. For the most part, students' reading skills grow rapidly during this part of the year. If they are lagging a bit behind, following are some things you can do to help them catch up:
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Sight word practice: Quick and accurate recognition of these words will help your child grow in confidence, and give them the mental space to focus on sounding out other words they are unsure of.
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Study those Spelling Words: For Grade Ones, this will help them with their sight words. For Grade Twos, it will help them recall the more challenging phonics rules we learn about this year.
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Home reading - thoughtful practice: The absolutely best thing you can do to help your child grow their reading skills is to make sure they practice reading as much as they can. This includes reading to an adult every night for at least 10 minutes, but it also includes:
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Car books: Keep some interesting books in the car for your child to pull out and look at while driving. While this is not a good activity for those who struggle with motion sickness, it provides valuable extra reading time for those who can.
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Older/Younger sibling/cousin reading: Having your child read with an older sibling, or read to a younger one is a very valuable experience for both children!
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Reading the world/environmental print activities: reading signs aloud in the car as you are travelling, or reading the labels on food (or even aisles) at the grocery store. Turn it into a game and see how many words you can discover starting with specific letters.
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Sensory Activities: Have your child write out their spelling words in shaving cream on a tray, or having them practice them by creating them out of playdough is very useful and helps keep many children engaged in reading.
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Grade One Reading Skills Development
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Recognizing sight words within our reading
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Sounding out words using our knowledge of letter sounds
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Retelling our story accurately after we have read it.
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Good readers ask questions about what they read, and form pictures in our minds about what is happening. We try to think about what might be happening next and see if we're right!
Grade One Word Work
Weekly Spelling: Sight Words
While a strong understanding of phonics is essential to learning how to read, we all know that not all words in English follow those rules.
Sight words are some of the most common words found in reading, and many times do not follow common phonics rules.
The ability to read sight words quickly and accurately not only builds your child's confidence, but allows them to grow into a stronger, more fluent reader.
Thank you so much to everyone who has worked hard on our sight word lists so far! We are now moving from reading recognition to being able to recall our sight words on our weekly spelling tests.
Each week students will use a variety of activities to help them memorize 6 sight words each week. At the end of the week our students will complete a spelling test, just like the Grade Twos. it's quite a rite of passage, and most students are quite excited to show me that they are able to remember their important words too!
Following you will find the list of sight words we are doing for each week. Thanks for supporting your students!
Spelling List: March 27th - 30th
1. did
2. do
3. eat
4. four
5. get
6. came
Grade Two Reading Skills Development
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Accurate reading of our sight words
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Using the phonics rules we know to sound out words we are unsure of
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Fluent reading: reading aloud smoothly, paying attention to where we need to stop and take a breath (ends of sentences) to make sure our reading makes sense.
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Comprehension: being able to accurately understand and explain what we have read
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Expression: using our punctuation clues (periods, exclamation points and question marks) to help us read with expression and interest
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We are asking questions to figure out what is going on in our reading, and to find clues to figure out what might happen next.
Grade Two Word Work
Parts of Speech: March 27th - 30th:
In Grade Two we are learning more advanced phonics rules and applying them both in our weekly selling test, as well as in our daily reading and writing activities.
Weekly spelling focus: plural nouns
Our focus continues to be on parts of speech rather than on strictly phonics rules.
Parts of speech are concepts such as nouns, verbs, and pronouns. It is important for us to take some time to learn these labels so that we can learn the phonics rules that are associated with them
s rFor example, in order for us to be able to write correct plurals such as cats, wolves or sheep, we need to know what a noun is, that a plural noun is more than one, and that we spell (and speak), them differently. While we do this naturally as we talk, it is a learned written skill.
Now that we are familiar with nouns, verbs and pronouns, we will move on to learning about plural nouns.
In speech, we automatically change the form of our nouns from singular to plural whenever we speak of more than one noun. Usually, it involves using some form of the "s" sound. However, this concept can be quite tricky to figure out in written form at first.
When our noun ends with a consonant, we end it with an "s".
If our noun ends with ch, s, ss, sh, ch, or z we end it with an "es".
If our noun ends with a vowel, we use "es"
If our noun ends with a "y" we end it with "ies"
If our noun ends with an "f", we usually end it with "ves".
Whew! All these rules can be daunting! That is, until we think about how we speak logically.
As a result, rather than strict memorization, I teach our students to think about what our ending might be. For example, if we have the word "dog", it sounds right to put that simple "s" sound on and have "dogs". However, if we have the word "box", to add a simple "s" sound simply makes it sound like "boxxxxxsssss". It doesn't work! We add the "e" in "es" as a "spacer" to help us hear our plural as we speak. The rules can seem quite complicated at first, until we look at it as a logical extension of how we speak.
We will be spending a lot of time saying our plural nouns out loud, playing matching games and doing some noun scavenger hunts around the class as we learn which plural to use for each type of noun.
While we do this we are still going to be looking for the phonics rules we know hidden within our verbs.
Spelling List: March 27th - 30th
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books
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dishes
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watches
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boxes
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ants
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dresses
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babies
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kisses
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branches
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ponies
Home Reading & Raz Kids: Mindful Practice
Raz-kids Daily Reading Information:
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site: kidsa-z.com
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teacher name: MrsLarsenWall
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Students click their own name
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Password is their own name
While I give students as much time as I can to practice our reading strategies at school, reading practice at home is essential to your child's success.
This is why each month every student has a chance to earn a prize by reading for 10 minutes a night, out loud to a parent or other adult. For Grade Ones, this allows the adult to assist the student with any challenging words. I know many of our Grade Twos are now enjoying chapter books, which is fantastic! However, reading aloud to an adult at this level is still important. It allows your child to practice both their fluency and expression as they read.
With both grades, chatting with your child about what they have read - interesting details, what they think may happen next - also helps them grow into strong readers.
Leveled readers, like those found on Raz-Kids, build students' reading skills and confidence, which is why each student has access to an online account.
However, this is not the only way to practice. If your child prefers to read paper books, or is working on a favourite chapter book, it still counts! Your local library also has a great selection of books in a variety of levels. As long as your child is able to read most of the words, and only needs to work on sounding out two or three words on a page, they will continue to grow in their reading.
Grade One Writing Focus and Skills Development
We have worked hard to build up our printing skills, our ability to both quickly recognize and use our letter sounds to create simple words. We're now busy combining these words into simple sentences.
Current focus: simple sentences
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complete thought
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begin with capital letters
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end with correct punctuation
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use sight words and phonics rules for correct spelling
Grade Two Writing Focus and Skills Development
Our Grade Twos are master sentence writers, and we are moving on to creating more complex, "stretched" sentences by including sense details. We're working on doing this without making our sentences more than one thought, which can be tricky.
We are also working on creating 3-5 sentence paragraphs, remembering to put in punctuation so it doesn't become one super long sentence.
Current focus: detailed sentences
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use all our previous skills (see Grade One)
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include sense describing words
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create 3-5 sentence paragraph, remembering capitals and periods
Unit: Informational Writing
Introduction: All About Animals!
We have had fun delving into the creativity of Fairy Tales, but now it's time to move on and take a look at the interesting and fascinating facts and information we can learn from informational reading and writing.
Our world is a huge and wonderful place, within which God has created interesting places and fascinating creatures. We see them all around us, along with the super interesting things we ourselves have invented - like cars, bubble gum, or hydrophonic gardens. Our children truly love to learn all about what they can see around them, and what exists that they haven't yet experienced. This is what makes informational reading and writing so fun and exciting!
We are beginning with some more structured reading and writing activities about various animals, and will be moving to our own research project, where we get to investigate and write about a topic of our choice!
Unit Focus
We will be identifying and using the elements of informational reading and writing to help us discover more about the world around us. We will begin to understand and use tables of contents, glossaries, indexes, headers and titles to find interesting information on our topics. We will use topic sentences and details to write an tell others about what we've learned. All along the way we will be doing our best to practice our super sentence writing by using phonics rules, sight words, titles and ending punctuation.
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