Literacy Collaborative

Literacy Collaborative

Theresa Primary is a Literacy Collaborative school. As part of our reading program, we will have a balanced literacy program. This is a framework where children will be given many opportunities to experience lessons in shared reading and writing, interactive/community writing, independent reading and writing, guided reading and writing as well as read alouds. Your child will be reading at his or her own level during guided reading time. The goal of this program is to have each child read and write independently and successfully. The components are as follows:

Word Study: Whole Group

Main Focus is on the sight words. A new word is taught every week. Books are read that have the word of the week in it and do writing activities with this word so the children truly learn it. Sight words are very important because when the students start to learn how to read, these sight words will be the majority of the words in the books. If they do not know the words, then they will have a hard time with reading.

Another main focus would be student's names. This includes knowing how to write their name and knowing the letters in their name.

Students knowing the alphabet and the sounds the letters make.

Phonics is another huge part of word study. In phonics, they will learn rhyming (cat, bat, sat), beginning sounds, ending sounds, word families, syllables (how many parts in a word ex: sand-wich), color words (red, green, blue), and vowels (a, e, i, o, u).

Read Aloud: Whole Group

Read fictional (Fake) and Informational (True) books to the children and have discussions about these books.

Focus on the students comprehending the story.

Focus on the text features of a book. These include the parts of a book. (Front Cover, Back Cover, Spine, what the author does, what the illustrator does, etc.)

Students learning how to make predictions in a book. (Guessing what might happen next.)

Shared Reading: Whole Group

This is where I model techniques and strategies for reading. I do this by using a Big Book or Big Poems, which is big enough for the whole class to see and read.

The four five main strategies that I focus on in shared reading are reading left to right, top to bottom, voice to print match (saying the words that are there), and reading the sight words.

What is taught in shared reading is crucial for when they start reading on their own because these strategies taught will carry over when they are reading independently.

Community Writing: Whole Group

This is where the students and the teacher write pieces together on big sheets of paper. Students actually get to come up and write on the paper. This is where the students learn how to write and learn what writing looks like.

Narrative (stories), opinion, and informational pieces are written together as a class.

The pen is shared as I model and guide the writing process.

Writer's Workshop: Whole Group & Independent

This is where the students truly develop and practice their own writing.

They write about real stories from their lives and draw pictures to support their writing.

Students also learn how to tell a story orally from the beginning to the end of their story.

Toward the end of the year, the students will also learn how to write Poetry.

Centers: Independent

This is where the students get to move from center to center (stations) on their own to complete activities that are related to what has been taught in literacy and Math. This is very important because it teaches the students how to be independent.

Guided Reading: Small Groups

This is very important because this is where the students learn to read. Small groups of children are pulled over during center time and are taught how to read. The groups are based on the needs of the children, which is why certain children are grouped together (their needs are the same).

In Kindergarten, students start at level A Books. By the end of the year, we want children to be on level C or D. (The higher the letter, the higher level of book and higher level of reading.)