Another busy week has flown by!

Wow, what a great week we've had!! Our 1st graders have had a really busy week - learning new "just right book" and "look book" book-shopping routine in reader's workshop, writing many personal narratives in writer's workshop, skip counting by 5's and 10's in math, and setting personal goals and learning more about the members of our classroom community in social studies. Not to mention we had a great time meeting our visiting authors, Steve Skidmore and Steve Barlow on Sunday. Finally, last but not least, we also met our 4th grade reading buddies from Mr. Bernhardt's class yesterday and did a fun pirate activity with them!

This week in Literacy, our children focused a lot on Word Work (or sometimes people call it Word Study). Word work is one of the components of Balanced Literacy. Word work plays an integral part of children's literate-rich lives because it helps develop their accuracy in recognizing and writing sight words, understanding the meanings in texts, and most importantly, it allows them to enjoy and appreciate language when they are able to use different word-solving skills such as the understanding of phonics, spelling patterns, suffixes and prefixes and many more to read and write (Bear, Invernizzi, & Templeton, 2008) 

So this week, our "word workers" have been working hard on the beginning consonants (/b/ and /d/) and beginning and ending digraphs (/sh/ and /ch/). Together with their partners, they sorted the picture cards that have these sounds (i.e. cheese, ship, chair) under the proper heading. Later, we also did another activity called "Word Hunting" where we became word detectives and carried our imaginary magnifying glasses around the classroom, "hunting" for words that had these sounds and recorded them on dry-erase boards.
The digraphs we have been working on this week is: /th/, /ch/ and /sh/.
The blends we have been working on this week is: "st", "fr" and "sw".
Ask your child what words they know that have those sounds in either the beginning, middle or end of the word. Or they can try to do a word hunt around the house!

Reference: 

Bear, D.R., Harris, R.C., & Pearson Education, Inc. (2008). Words their way DVD tutorial: Planning for word study in K-8 classrooms. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Pearson Education.