Welcome back! I hope everyone was able to have a restful winter break! We have had a really pleasant start up this week. The kids have all come back refreshed and ready to tackle our classroom jobs! We took it a little easy this week to ease ourselves back in.
Next week, we will start our home reading program. I have read with each student and have chosen books for them that are at their instructional level. This means that they will struggle with some of the words in the book I send home with them. Please don't feel discouraged! This is helping them to notice patterns in words and continue to build vocabulary. The goal of home reading is to practice the story until they can read it fluently. This means, they are reading the story in phrases, rather than word by word with pauses in between. Also, the goal is for them to practice enough that they can read the story to me with 5 or less mistakes.
Here are some helpful tips to use when reading with your child:
Chunky Monkey Strategy: look for smaller words within big words to help sound it out
Flippy Dolphin Strategy: flip the vowel sound in the word if it doesn't make sense. Long vowels are when the letters say their name, short vowels are when they make their regular sound
Help them notice or look for digraphs (wh, th, ch, sh) we have practiced these a lot in class!
to encourage their independence, when they stuck you can ask them if they want help or thinking time. If they choose thinking time, give them about 10 more seconds, and then you can tell them the word. We want them to enjoy reading so we don't want them to be stuck for long
encourage them to retell the story in order
The home reading books should be practiced every day, but it shouldn't take more than about 10 minutes!
Here are some other things we practiced this week:
we are working on our mental math fluency for basic facts. This will support using less thinking power for small numbers and save their thinking power for more complex questions
we began to talk about parts of a story (setting, character, problem and solution) and are writing our own fictional stories!
they are beginning to learn basketball skills in gym with Mrs. Braraten
we continue to practice our reading skills by learning new sight words, and practicing oral language skills such as recognizing rhymes and breaking down words into their sounds to support spelling and reading both!
Have a great weekend!
Mrs. Parkinson
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