Reading - Mrs. Hartsock's group

We tackled our first shared reading story in our anthology this week - Cliff Hanger.  Students learned rock climbing vocabulary, and practiced the reading strategy of predicting what would happen next in this exciting story.  Ask your child to summarize the story for you. :) Other skills that we worked on include cause and effect, similes, alphabetical order and words with inflected endings.  We also practiced the art of reading with a partner to work on reading fluency.

This week we also reviewed/practiced independent reading (ask your child what an independent reader should do/not do) and learned how to record what we've read daily in our reading logs.  We also discussed about what makes a book "just right" for us to help students select independent reading books. (Once we complete our DRA and MAP reading assessments, I will help students select books in their reading lexile range - more info to come on that.)  Now that we've laid the groundwork for our classroom routines and expectations for when the teacher is working with small groups, we will be ready to start guided reading groups next week.