Week Four

My last few weeks of teaching have been...really rewarding. It is amazing as one of the teachers in the classroom to be able to know so much about each one of my students. I was always intimidated by that aspect of teaching. I didn't think that I could ever know so much about so many kids-but it just takes time and attention given to them to learn all about their traits, their strengths and weaknesses, and their interests.

We started reading groups this past week with our students. The first day I worked with the higher level students, so we used more difficult books and got more into the meat of the story. We started as we always do, with a picture walk through the book and a look at the characters. Then the students read through the book individually while I listened to each of them read. The same scenario ensued with my next group of slightly lower students except we worked on a few more concepts and they needed a little more help with their books.

The next day I worked with lower level students and much lower level books. It is amazing to me that students who are roughly the same age can be so far apart in their reading interests and abilities. The lower students needed quite a bit more work and modeling before reading their books. We worked on word families, or "chunks" before we even looked at the books. We worked on the -ap, -am, -at, and -an work families this week. I have the students sort the words under the proper word families. We've found that students respond much more to calling the word families "chunks" because it makes it more relevant to them and they have a greater understanding of what it means.
It seems as though reading is definitely the main focus of first grade, at least in these first few weeks. It seems as though some days we are working on reading all day long. As reading is the basis and foundation for all other subjects, I can see why the focus would be so heavy on this subject in first grade. If the students do not know the basic sight words and high frequency words or how to sound out their words how will they ever be able to decode higher level texts? In addition to reading we also work heavily on handwriting, spelling, and letters-very, very basic.

I love working with my students though. They make my day by giving lots of hugs and smiles and many moments to laugh at. We have many kids in our classroom who love to sing, beatbox, and dance. They love to hold their teacher's hand and blush when you give them lots of praise. They are just precious darlings and I love so much about working with them. Gifts I've received? A dandelion given to me as a 'wishing flower' and a grass/weed of some sort, both of which I have proudly displayed on my desk as if they were the most lovely and expensive trinkets I've ever been given. Our class pet? A very dead looking chrysalis in a big jam jar. It started out the year as a huge, green caterpillar and has since morphed into a brown, dry cocoon just waiting to turn into a butterfly! We found out that sometimes the chrysalis won't open until spring!! I don't know if our first graders can wait that long...or if I can wait that long!

Thanks for reading my classroom adventures! I will probably end up posting here once a week at the end of my week with the kiddos :)
Have a happy day!

Mrs. Aman