For each of these instructional activities, there are specific goals. 

Takes about 15 minutes. The purpose of this segment is not to teach letters and sounds or words. The purpose is to develop receptive and expressive oral language and vocabulary. We want them talking. We want them listening and we want them talking. Dialogic reading has a long research history and is effective for children in a wide range of language and literacy needs. For building oral language, maximizing student talk is key. Tracking print is actually not helpful here. The goal is to encourage children to talk about but not memorize the content of the weeks book. This type of reading is called Dialogic reading and the research literature, because it involved an ongoing and often free wheeling dialogue between the teacher and the students.

Use the same book all week in Dialogic Reading, you’re going to be reading it everyday, but the questions that you ask each day are going to be different. There is also a total of 4 vocabulary words that will be introduced across the week. 

Do two words on day one and two. Two new words on day three and four and then you review all four words on the last day. Many teachers will display the book and cards for the four words and it’s suggested to do this for each book and you leave them up for as long as you can that way you can revisit these books and words to keep reminding them of these words that you’ve taught. This prompts teachers and children to review word meanings when you are in a new book. It allows students to go back and point to the definition. 

Word walk requires that teachers teach words with child friendly definitions. Finding words in text and gradually scaffolding children’s ability to use target words in a simple sentence context. To make this easier, your lesson plan will have all of this.

Bookworms uses poems where you use one poem for the entire week for different areas of focus each day in order to build PA skills. Also, they use pictures and word sorts to compare and contrast letter sounds and word families later in the year. 

Monday and Tuesday takes time to teach students the poem to have it memorized. Once students have it memorized, they can work with it the rest of the week for each specific task. 

It’s important to understand that the ELA block is broken into halves. Half of the lessons are on the interactive read aloud and the other half are for process writing or those longer pieces of writing. 

The texts for read alouds are above level. The focus is on reading for meaning. We want kids to gain meaning from the text. The teacher is doing all of the decoding so that the students can focus on the vocabulary meaning and the meaning from the text. 

The nonfiction texts support Science and SS topics, but they are not aligned to any one state standards. They are meant to just give the kids more content knowledge for when they get to those subjects. Remember every pupil response. Those thumbs up, turn and talks are vital to make sure all students are participating with the text. 

In fiction books, the anchor chart is almost always a story map. Then there is always a day two and sometimes a day 3. You can see the difference between the first day and the last day. On the last day of kindergarten, you will reread the entire book again, there are fewer stopping points and this is the day you will teach two meaning vocabulary words, two tier 2 words, you will teach sentence composing and then you will assign the written response and do that as a shared writing piece. 

The difference between nonfiction and fiction is slight. You will actually introduce the technical vocabulary at the beginning of the lessons so that students have the background knowledge from the start and you teach the text structure so the students know how the book is set up, on day one right at the beginning of the reading and you can see the rest of the days are the same as a fiction text. 

In the bookworms sentence composing, the sentences come from the book, from the read aloud. The lesson plans are written out for you in the lesson plan segment and you’ll find that the grammar skills are based on the standards and that this instruction has a spirling effect over the course of the year. You’re constantly continually reviewing and practicing those kinds of skills using new sentences from the new texts that they are studying. 

There are four types of sentence composing activities. In each days lesson you will probably do two of the four and this slide shows you the four different activities. 

In Kindergarten, the writing lessons are 2-3 days and fall at the end of each week. The lessons are linked to either the shared or ELA text. In Kindergarten, in each writing unit, we teach the characteristics of a genre. By stretching the writing on one piece by two or three days, you’re able to remind students what elements are needed in each genre. 

So what does writing look like day to day? We have approximately 15 minutes of teacher directed modeling and explicit instruction and we have approximately 15 minutes for students to complete structured work with specific process goals for each day. There is approximately, 5-10 minutes at the end for students to share their work with their peers and hear what they did as well as provide structured feedback about what they saw their friends do. 

Some of the key features are teacher modeling. The teacher shows how to write the type of text that is the target of instruction. This is usually accompanied by a think aloud where the teacher shares the thoughts they have in order to complete the task. 

You will notice there are shifts in focus for Kindergarten writing throughout the year. 

You have your basic genres that are found in the common core state standards that we will be addressing throughout the year. The goal is to confidently compose original text in the three genres. So this slide represents the target for Kindergarten for the end of the year. You’ll notice that they are very straight forward. For example, book review, you will introduce a topic and tell an opinion about the topic. 

Through week 27, students spend most of their time just orally revising their sentences. So just thinking orally does it have a subject, does it have a predicate and does it make sense? Then, starting in week 28, they will receive the checklist shown. 

Beginning week 32, we add two more additional rows to the checklist. We want students to start thinking about if their sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with ending punctuation. Pairs of students will work with one another to check and see if their sentences include each of these elements. 

For scoring your student work, you will be using two different rubrics. One is the conventions rubric that's provided in your manual and the other is the one that you see here. This narrative rubric focuses on the content and structure of the written product. You can see that it is based on the expectations found in the common core state standards. 

The DI block is at skill level. 

The Differentiated Instruction Block all stems from the Cognitive Model of Reading. 

In 2nd grade and above, teachers will use this simple decision tree to help. Of course, this doesn't work for Kindergarten, because oral reading fluency assessments do not even exist for Kindergarten.  Instead of using fluency as the gateway, you'll actually use letter sound knowledge and follow the grapic to the right.

 In the 7th or 8th week of Kindergarten, you will assess your students knowledge of letter sounds. You’re going to ask yourself are they week or strong in letter sounds. If students have very week letter sound knowledge, we group them into a group called, basic alphabet knowledge.  If students in Kindergarten have strong letter sounds, we actually group students in a group called using letter sounds first and then they move to using letter patterns. 

You begin working with the alphabet as an entire set because this makes learning the individual names and shapes easier. Next you use sets of pictures matched to letter names. And then after the picture sort, you use sets of letters by frequency to reinforce letter names and sounds. You begin with two letters and then add one each day. Then the high frequency words are next, you begin with two words and then add one each day and then to practice concepts of print you use simple sentences pertaining at least one two syllable word. 

Above gives a visual for how your BAK lesson will go.

After you have taught lessons 1-14, you are going to assess students in this group, by administering the provided basic alphabet knowledge assessment for lessons 1-14. It has 3 components. Alphabet knowledge, letter names and letter sounds. So to determine if a student is ready to move on to lessons 15-30, or if they need to repeat lessons 1-14, you’re going to use this decision tree.

For the lessons 15-30, you will assess them with that tool. It has two components, letter names and letter sounds. To determine if a student is ready to move onto letter sounds or repeat lessons 15-30, you look at this decision tree. It’s very important to note that you do not move students out of this group if they don’t know all of their short vowel sounds. This group is different than the other groups in the bottom stair steps as this group in that students can remain in this group for as many cycles as are needed for them to know all of those short vowels sounds and at least 18 consonant sounds. 

Using letter sounds module. Here is where the students know know almost all of their letters and sounds will be put. 

In these lessons you use consonant vowel consonant words to orally blend and segment. You use the same words to segment and blend during the next portion of the lesson. And then during sounding and blending you use consonant vowel consonant words to contrast two short vowels each day. There are five new items for each vowel each day and finally you will select 10 high frequency words to teach the first week based on the Fry inventory and then another 10 words for the second week and then you review all 20 words the third week. 

Above gives a visual for how your ULS group will go.

High frequency words are not used to determine if a student should move on to the next skill. High frequency words are only assessed to determine if a particular word needs reteaching. Once you have finished lessons 1-14, you give the using letter sounds assessment and follow this decision tree.

Using letter patterns group is the last group in the stair step before they would move on to the second one. 

In this group, these are students who need to use short-vowel patterns to decode words. The first part of these lessons are oral segmenting and blending matched to letter patterns. You use sets of high utility words to teach letter patterns. There are three families per day with 5 item in each. Next you will teach 10 high frequency words from the high frequency word inventory that you need to teach the first week and then another 10 the second week and then review all 20 in the third week. 

Above provides a visual for how your ULP group will go.

After you have completed 14 lessons, it’s time to assess. The criteria for if you move on is different in Kindergarten than 1st grade and beyond. Give students the assessment which has three components. Segmenting and blending, sounding and blending and high frequency words. So to determine if your Kindergarten students is ready to move onto dictated sentences, which is the next group for these guys, or stay in this group, you will use the flow chart. (Read the chart). 

Here we are looking at the dictated sentence group and this is only for Kindergarten students. It is made up of students who are proficient with short vowel patterns. They can read CVC words, they may be able to read a range of predictable and decodable and even natural language texts, but the question is can they write? Cognitively spelling and handwriting are more challenging than reading CVC words, This group is designed specifically to build competence in inventive spelling. In this group, students will continue to stretch and coordinate their literacy muscles, that is their ability to segment phonemes, their letter sound and pattern knowledge, and their handwriting. 

Complex sentence are the instructional focus here. A complex sentence would be that it includes words that are much more difficult than what a student would find in their reading book vocabulary. Contextualized tasks are more natural, so you start with building context and meaning in one of three ways, whether it’s with an initial choral reading, a read aloud or a discussion of a shared event. Then you work with the group to co-create a sentence summary that they can understand and remember. Finally, the students use invented spelling to write the sentence independently. 

The structure looks like this. First you build background knowledge and provide context. Again, you are going to engage students in either reading chorally from a short book, and listening to a brief read aloud or in discussing a topic or event. For the next 5 minutes, you will co-construct a sentence together. This would be a sentence level summary of at least six words and you’re going to help students memorize it. So you’ll be repeating it, counting the number of words in the sentence, making sure that students know that they are going to be writing. Next students will write independently for about 5 minutes. You’ll direct children to write the sentence using the sounds that they hear in invented spelling. You are not going to help them stretch sounds or match sounds to letters and patterns. Finally, to close the lesson, you’ll write the sentence yourself, stretching the sounds and representing them. Keep in mind here that students are not to erase their own work or make corrections. 

This group is ongoing. It’s an open ended group. They will continue to build automaticity as long as you provide them with structured chances to spell words that they have not yet memorized.