Curriculum

=**Reader's Workshop:**=

These are a few strategies we have included in our classrooms to help manage Read-to-Self.

1. Special Reading Friends: Students that are following the classroom read-to-self (Daily 5) rules will be able to read with a special stuffed animal reading friend from the teacher.

2. Make reading fun with special pointers (witch fingers, chopstick with a glittery end, party drink stirs, Harry Potter wands, etc.). We give each student a witch finger to use for the year- it stays in the book bag that goes back and forth every day.

3. One group a day can choose new just-right books for their book box or book bag. You may want to include a shopping list for a student to make sure they are choosing appropriate books (2 level 1s, 3 level 2s. etc).

4. Show students a variety of reading positions, like feet in the air and up against a wall for an inversion.

5. Make sure kids are comprehending! Fill plastic Easter eggs with questions. They can choose one egg, open the egg and answer the question that's inside. These questions are also given to parents at conferences with the suggestion that they leave them by their child's bed to refer to at story time. These questions are based upon the DRA 2: These questions are a DRAFT of a work in progress! They combine the Fountas and Pinnell assessments and the Depth and Complexity Icons.

=Writer's Workshop:=

1. Include an individual word wall in each student's writing folder. When they are spelling out a word, students can place a small wiki-stick under the word they are spelling to keep their place and help focus their attention.

2. Make an interactive word wall. Place word wall down at student level. Words can hang on word wall with a pushpin. Students are able to remove a word from the word wall to bring back to their seat. Students should put pushpin back in the wall to save their place and help them return the word to the correct location. Students can also try to get the pushpin to go back into the small hole, this is great for fine motor, and to limit the number of holes in the word wall butcher paper.

3. Really Good Stuff makes rubber stamps that have have squares for 2, 3, and 4 letter words. [|rubber stamps]) These help students know how many sounds/letters they need to write.

We also have one custom made with just ONE square (the same size as the Handwriting Without Tears rectangle) that we can use to stamp out multiple sounds or for words with digraphs.

4. Include funny phones in the writing center. Sounding out a word into a funny phone directs each sound right into the ear, making it easy to hear each sound. ( [|toobaloo (funny phones)])

=Guided Reading= We made some inexpensive self-inking rubber stamps (had a groupon for [|vistaprint] and then combined it with a google search for an additional promotional code) that we LOOOOVE! We pre-stamp a stack of colored coded sticky notes, write a quick, individualized note on each and the stick it to the front of the book going home.

Stamps we have include: "Words to practice at home" (we write any sight words included in the book that might still be challenging) "Practice this reading skill" (we include a tip, such as 'Touch each word' or 'Get your mouth ready for the first sound' etc) "Read this book __ times at home"