An Hour in Grade One

Welcome! Come start the day with us!

Lined up at our doors and ready to start the day! Look at those smiles!

We begin each day in a similar way. After greeting eachother and checking agendas, we spend a few minutes warming up for the day by doing an interactive Brain Warmer! The activities change every day and the students love them! 

Then we gather on the mat and spend a few minutes working with a poem. We work with the same poem all week long. This allows the children to build their reading fluency. Then the poem is used at our Poetry Center the following week. 

News time! Each day a different student shares some news with the class. This activity is a quick and powerful way to integrate language arts mini-lessons into our morning, such as sentence structure, punctuation, Word Wall Words, syllables, vowels, consonants, phonics, word families, rhymes ... the possibilities are endless!

(1) On spring break I am going to my farm. (2) It is my little sister's birthday.
(3) I went to the lake. (4) I am making an igloo!

We move straight into exchanging our Home Reading books. Students re-read the book they took home to a partner. They exchange their book for one at the same level, record the title and date in their log book, and quietly read the new book. I am able to read individually with 4 to 6 students in this short time, allowing progress to be assessed, feedback to be given, and book levels to be adjusted. What phenomenal readers!

After exchanging home reading books, we move straight into Literacy Centres. Children are grouped by similar abilities, however groups are very flexible and change as students develop their skills and grow. Here is a peek at literacy centers this week:

(a) Computer Centre

These students are working on Lexia, and individualized reading program, or exploring Starfall. They love this independent time to refine phonic skills!

(b) SMARTboard Centre

A variety of interactive games are played at this centre. This week, children are playing a memory game focussing on word families. They are trying to match the beginning of a word to the end of a word. When they make a word, they record it on their sheet. They think the nonsense words they uncover are hilarious!

(c) Poetry Centre

After a poem is worked with as a whole group, it becomes the featured poem at the Poetry Centre. Children re-read the poem and then work with it in different ways; filling in missing words, highlighting rhyming or spelling words, or illustrating the poem. 

(d) Word Work Centre

There are many hands-on games students enjoy at this centre! Many different language skills can be practiced. Two favourites are JINGO, a rhyming bingo game, and Roll, Read and Cover, a game that tests their phonic knowledge as they read individual words. This week the students were introduced to Pancake Match, a memory and sight word game where they take turns flipping over two pancakes to see if the words match. Whatever the challenge, the students are up for it!

Roll a die, read a word from that row,
and use a bingo dabber to mark the word!

Using a real flipper makes Pancake Match a million times more fun!
Thank you to the wonderful parent who created this game for us!

(e) Guided Reading

As the rest of the class is engaged, it is a perfect time to quietly read with a small group. Here we work on applying our reading strategies with books at the students' reading level. After working with a book together, students re-read the book either individually into a Toobaloo or with a partner quietly. 

(1) Reading together in a small group (2) Reading quietly into a Toobaloo
(3) Our board with several reading strategies (4) Reading with a buddy

If you can believe it, after completing all of these activities we are not even at morning recess yet! We still have about 30 minutes to squeeze in a little more Language Arts, such as a directed writing task, a reading comprehension activity, or a phonics lesson. Whew! 


Time flies when you're having fun!

Our student news activity was inspired by Cara Carroll at First Grade Parade and the Roll Read and Cover game at centers was inspired by Miss Kindergarten at Freebielicious.