Skating

I was very proud of how well the children did at skating this week!  Everyone gave it a try, and those who could not even stand up at the beginning made great progress by the end!

Sight words, short vowels and phonemic awareness....

CVC Words (consonant
vowel consonant) words
are great for developing
phonemic awareness

Just an update on our progress in language arts this month.  We have been working very hard on learning the sight words on the first list.  As a class, now the words displayed each week will be from List 2.  All the words from list one have come home on the back of the poems.  Please continue to review these words especially if your child is still working on list one.  This week, the poem has the 5 words that are giving us the most trouble for extra practice.  I will also be assessing reading this week and switching the groups around as need be.  Sight words are based on the Dolche list of words that appear most commonly in books.  The goal is to develop 'instant recognition' of these words.  The children are making great progress.  Many words are not sight words.  When children encounter these words in books,  we encourage them to use a variety of strategies to figure unfamiliar words out.  The most common thing we say to children is to 'sound it out'. (others include: using the pictures and context of the story for clues)  English is tricky.  Sounding out in reading requires a strong grasp of letter sounds (especially the vowels) and what is known as phonemic awareness.  That is the ability to blend the sounds mentally and connect them to a word they know.  Right now we are focusing on short vowel sounds and phonemic awareness in our literacy work.

 Journals is a very powerful tool to developing phonemic awareness.  Sounding out a word requires a great deal of phonemic awareness, much more than if students copy a word from a teacher in order for the spelling to be 'right'.  That is why I encourage the students to sound out as much as they can.  This makes for interesting journal entries!  But as the year progress, so does their spelling and writing.  As well,  not worrying too much about spelling frees the children up to write more interesting, meaningful stories.  Today,  we read the story "Ish" by Peter Reynolds to help us not to worry about having perfect spelling and drawing!