Reading Workshop is the model for the first-grade reading program. It gives students the opportunity to explore books and practice reading strategies daily. Students read independently as well as with partners, meet with the teacher for reading conferences as well as for strategy/small group instruction. Our units focus on: building good habits, using strategies to figure out unknown words, reading with fluency, expression, and comprehension, meeting characters and studying story elements, and reading informational text

Writing Workshop is the model for the first-grade writing program. Emphasis is placed on the content of writing, with mini-lessons provided to focus on various aspects of the writing process and different writing genres. Students continue to write about things that are meaningful to them, confer with teacher, and begin revising and editing their work. Students are encouraged to share their writing with classmates and give compliments and comments about their work.

Word Study touches upon letter/sound relationships, spelling strategies for encoding and decoding words and work on high frequency (word wall) words. The Words Their Way program combined with the Orton Gillingham mulitisensory approach allows students to work with various word sorts to develop an understanding of how words are structured. Students work independently and in differentiated small groups.

The Shared Reading component is an intentional interactive reading experience with print (enlarged texts, picture book, portions of extended texts, song and poem charts, etc.). During this time the teacher uses the text beyond their instructional level to model and point out specific teaching points. It allows students to practice book handling skills, directionality, one-to-one matching, punctuation, as well as discussing author/illustrator and story components. Choral reading the text helps students build reading fluency and comprehension.

Shared Writing allows students and teachers to work together on a piece of writing. The teacher is the scribe, and the students and the teacher collaborate to create the text. The writing that is produced should be easily available to students so they may read it over and over and use it as a model for their own writing. Shared writing can be taught in large- or small-group settings. It is a powerful teaching tool in all areas of the curriculum – for example, it can be used to teach students how to write a science experiment or a math journal entry.

Interactive Writing allows students to “share the pen” to co-create a text with the teacher. This helps students to practice using correct grammar, handwriting skills, and sentence structure.

Interactive Read Aloud with Accountable Talk allows students to listen and talk about books,concentrate on using strategies for comprehension and have meaningful conversations about the text.

Reynolds Elementary School

1st Grade

Balanced Literacy

Mathematics

Science

Social Studies

Open Circle

Technology

Health

Physical Education

Performing Arts

Art

World Language