Literacy

Literacy:

(Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening, and Language Arts)

The Wilson School District has adopted a “balanced literacy” approach to instruction. This model for instruction includes large group instruction, small group instruction, and individualized instruction to meet student's literacy needs. Children will be engaged in literacy activities during Reading Workshop and Writing Workshop on a daily basis. (See more information about Writing and Writing Workshop on "Writing Workshop" page)

Large Group Instruction

Students will participate in large group read aloud and think aloud during which time the teacher will share a selected text and model a variety of reading strategies and comprehension strategies. These strategies will include, but are not limited to, predicting, making connections, retelling, summarizing, sequencing, questioning, noting details, making inferences, and drawing conclusions. Large group mini-lessons will focus on a teaching point from the Units of Study developed by Lucy Calkins. These teaching points will be reinforced through small group instruction and one-on-one conferences.

Units of Study Include:

Unit 1: Building Good Reading Habits: This unit reinforces children's learning from kindergarten. Learners will establish partnerships and begin to learn how to become a strategic reader.
Unit 2: Learning About the World: Reading Nonfiction: Students will explore nonfiction text in this unit. They will work on various comprehension strategies, word solving strategies, vocabulary, fluency, and learn about author's craft.
Unit 3: Readers Have Big Jobs to Do: Fluency, Phonics, and Comprehension: This unit focuses on the reading process to set children up to read more complex texts.
Unit 4: Meeting Characters and Learning Lessons: A Study of Story Elements: This unit spotlights story elements and the skills that are foundational to literal and inferential comprehension, including empathy, imagination, envisioning, prediction, character study, and interpretation.

Small Group Instruction

Small group work may be referred to as “Guided Reading,” “Strategy Groups,” “Literature Circles.” or "One-on-One Conferences".

1. Guided Reading: An instructional approach that involves a teacher working with a small group of students who demonstrate similar reading behaviors and who are reading similar levels of texts.

2. Strategy Groups: These groups may contain children from different reading levels who struggle with the same skill or strategy.

3. Literature Circles: These are small groups of students who gather together to discuss a piece of literature in depth.

4. One-on-One Conferences: A child meets with the teacher to review a skill or strategy they are using in a book.

While small groups are working with a teacher, other students will be engaged in independent literacy activities. While reading students will be actively thinking about their reading, using post-it notes or their Reader's Workshop Notebook. This active reading is shared during small group reading time and at the conclusion of Reader's Workshop.

Language Arts: Phonics

Here is an overview of the Lucy Calkins Phonic Program

Unit 1: Talking and Thinking About Letters

This unit has big goals. First off, the unit provides cumulative review and reinforcement for key concepts in phonics that students encountered in kindergarten. It touches on all the most important phonics concepts from kindergarten: letter names and sounds, short vowels in CVC words, phonograms, blends, and digraphs, and a short list of approximately fifty high-frequency and high-utility words.

Unit 2: The Mystery of the Silent e

Unit 2 challenges children to use phonics workshop as a place to study words closely like a piece of evidence and make discoveries to help them understand how language works. In this unit students will focus on CVCe words. This unit will ask students to look closely at words and word parts to decode difficult words by breaking them into parts and putting those parts back together.

Unit 3: From Tip to Tail: Reading Across Words

In this unit, students will read nonfiction closely and thoughtfully. Students will concentrate on blends and digraphs that appear in words.. High frequency words will also be a focus in this unit. Knowledge of these words can help them read other words!

Unit 4: Word Builders: Using Vowel Teams to Build Big Words

In this unit, students will become word builders. Using snap cubes with word parts, children will get to work constructing words, and challenge themselves to build longer, bigger words. Students will learn about various vowel teams (example ea, oa, oi, ect), New sets of high frequency words will be introduced as well.

Unit 5: Marvelous Bloopers: Learning Through Wise Mistakes

This unit teaches many things! For example: r-controlled vowels, high frequency words, capitalization, ellipses, and much, much more!

Report abuse