8:45 - 8:55 Entrance and Question of the Day

The first thing my students do as they enter the classroom is to sign in by answering the question of the day on the smart board. This helps me save time on taking attendance, it also allows students to start using their skills right from the start of the day. My students look forward to this activity as it provides them an opportunity to use the smart board. I ensure that my questions are relevant to my students and fun so that they are motivated to decode them. They are required to write their name and copy down the response on the smart board. This allows them to practice letter formation using a fun media. My students have been practicing decoding words by sounding out the letters. I provide scaffolds when necessary. We have established the concepts of sharing strategies and helping the members of our community grow rather than completing tasks for them. Literacy components: phonemic awareness, letter sounds and phonics, vocabulary, oral language, and concepts of print. Question for Wednesdays: Would you rather have one eye in the middle of your head, or have two noses? Name one eye two noses

8:55 - 9:05 Sharing Circle

My students are expected to come on the carpet and sit in a circle as soon as they are done answering the question of the day. The students who come in early have two options as they wait for everyone else to arrive: 1) get a book from their individualised reading bin 2) chat quietly with their classmates. I start the sharing circle with saying a greeting and a little bit about me (e.g., I will let them know if I am having a great day or not, or if something exciting/important has happened). I will also share my answer to the question of the day and my reasoning behind it. I will then pass the Speaking Stick to the student next to me to do the same. Each student will have the opportunity to speak (approximately 1 minute/student). This is also an opportunity for students to share anything that can help us with building a stronger community (e.g., concerns, suggestions, or words of encouragement). Students have the right to pass. The Speaking Stick is a large pencil. It is used to remind us of our roles during the sharing circle. The person holding the Speaking Stick is the speaker and has the undivided attention of his/her audience. People without the stick are expected to remain quiet and listen to the speaker. Sharing circle helps my students feel that they are part of a close community where every member is appreciated and valued. It is also a safe way for students to improve their selfesteem and practice oral language and communication skills. Literacy components: Oral language and knowledge building.

9:05 - 9:30 Reading Workshop

The reading work shops have three components: 1) read-alouds, 2) discussion, 3) response activities. The reading and discussion takes place on the carpet and response activities takes place at the round tables. I choose both fiction and non-fiction books for our read-alouds. To stay consistent with what my students are doing in their regular classroom, currently we are focusing on the theme of communities for our read-alouds. Discussion usually takes place during and after the read-aloud. I take this opportunity to explicitly model the strategies that good readers use. I model by thinking aloud. For example: hmm, I am not sure what this word means, so I am going to go back and read the sentence again and see if there are any clues in the text and the picture that can help me understand what the author is trying to say. I also encourage student participation through direct and specific questioning. Response activities allow students to practice specific comprehension strategies: making connections, creating mental images, digging deeper, inferring, asking questions, and synthesizing (Miller, 2002). So far we have focused on making text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections. This week I am introducing the concept of creating mental images. I will start off by talking about how writers and readers create mental images when they write and read. I will specifically model how we can make mental images by re-reading a small section of the book and describing the vivid image that came to my mind while reading it. Students are then given time to express their own mental image using a graphic organizer. To access the graphic organizers that I have used so far refer to the Appendix (under the resources tab). My students are at a stage where they are starting to print more when completing their graphic organizers. Book used of Wednesday: It Takes a Village by Jane Cowen-Fletcher. This is a story based on a West African proverb that shows various aspects of village life. This visually appealing book conveys a sense of what it means to belong to a community. Assessment: observation notes, checklist, student work (their completed organizers.) Literacy components: concepts of print, oral language, vocabulary, and knowledge building. 9:30 - 9:50 Jolly Jingles

All my students can benefit from reviewing their letter sounds. Since they have all been introduced to Jolly Phonics, I use Jolly Jingles to re-teach letter sounds for all 42 phonemes. By using a different program I ensure that my students remain motivated and engaged. I introduce a new sound on Mondays and Wednesdays. Sound of the day: e For song and action refer to the Appendix (under the resources tab). This activity takes place on the carpet. After introducing the new sound along with its song and action, we review all the sounds introduced so far. To review the sounds learnt so far, the teacher picks a letter out of a bag and sings: what does (insert the letter name) say? Students sing back: (the letter name) says (the letter sound (x3)) Students perform the actions as they say each sound. Sounds introduced so far: s, a, t, i, p, n, and ck.

Phonic Games: The last 5 to 10 minutes of this period is spent on playing a game. Students find a sit at the round tables. The teacher asks for a volunteer to come up and pick a word from a bag. The student sounds out every letter in the word one by one and in the correct sequence. The rest the of class has to guess what the word is. To ensure that all students are supported to guess the word, they are given time and are encouraged to write down each letter they hear on paper. For every word a new volunteer is picked. The words in the bag only contain the letter sounds that the students have learned already. The words for today: ten, set, pen, pet, net. Literacy components: phonemic awareness, letter sounds and phonics, and oral language. 9:50 - 10:10 Reading Practice - iPads/Smart Board

This period is an opportunity for students to practice reading and rereading decodable books and improve their fluency skills. On Wednesday each student practices reading decodable books individually on iPads, smart board, or the computers. Books used in this period include: Starfall books (online), Bob books (the iPad app), and AZ decodable books (online). Each student is given a wide range of options to choose from. The choices offered to each student is tailored to their specific needs and abilities. Assessment: this is a great opportunity for the teacher to go around and informally assess reading progress of students. Literacy components: phonemic awareness, letter sounds and phonics, vocabulary, concepts of print, reading fluency, reading comprehension 10:10 - 10:30 Recess 10:30 - 10:55 Spelling Fun and Word Wall

The purpose of this period is to help students make sense of how words work by investigating morphology. The purpose of this period to help students make sense of how words work by investigating morphology. Teaching spelling systematically is especially important for my students as they all have memory weakness. On Monday and Tuesday, students investigated the spelling of words: play and day. Wednesdays spelling lesson will give students the opportunity to investigate other words that have the long a sound (words containing ay, ey, and ai). Materials: 8 bowls labelled long a sound, and 9 sets of picture cards with words: way, they, hair, red, yes, and ball. These are the high frequency words that my students have been coming across a lot. This activity takes place at the carpet. Each student gets her/his own set of picture cards. The teacher goes through each picture card one by one, reading each word with the class. Students are then given time to go through each word, select the ones that have the long a sound and put them in their bowl. Once everyone is done they will review all the words as a class. The teacher writes all the words on the board and as a class they chant and clap the spelling of each word. The words are then added to our interactive word wall.

Students are also given the opportunity to add their words to their individual word list if they feel they need more practice with the spelling of the words. Assessment: observation, anecdotal notes, checklists, & work products. Observe the strategies used for reading the words. Observe the ability to accurately classify word families. Literacy components: phonemic awareness, letter sounds and phonics, vocabulary, and spelling and word study 10:55 - 11:15 Centres

This is the opportunity for students to practice a wide range of literacy skills through playing games. The centres change weekly Students can choose the centre they want to go to each day. Passport system is used to ensure that all students have gone to each centre at least once by the end of the week. Centres for the week: Little Writer, Startfall, scrabbles, Mailbox Little Writer - This is a tracing app that can be used on our four iPads. Students trace letters and numbers by following the arrows (maximum of 1 student per iPad). The focus of this centre is lower case letters as the large portion of any text is in lower case letters. Starfall - Different Starfall games are setup on four computers (maximum of 1 student per computer). This week games 1 to 4 are setup from http://www.starfall.com/n/level-a/learn-to -read/load.htm?f Scrabbles - This board game is played with the teacher (maximum of 3 students at a time). Mailbox - Students write a letter to the mayor of the community (the teacher) and mail it by dropping it in the community cardboard mailbox. Students have had a mini lesson on letter writing with examples. Samples of letters as well as graphic organizers are provided at this centre. Assessment: this is a great opportunity for the teacher to go around and informally assess reading progress of students. Also, when it is time to perform the formal tests, this would be a good period to pull out students and assess them individually. Literacy components: phonemic awareness, letter sounds and phonics, vocabulary, oral language, spelling and word study, concepts of print, writing convention, reading comprehension, and writing processes and strategies. 11:15 - 11:45 Writing Workshop

For the writing workshop period, I use Lucy Calkins Units of Study for Primary Writing: A Yearlong Curriculum. Throughout the year we will go through 7 units of study. We spend around 3 weeks on each unit. The structure of this period: mini-lesson (5 minutes), workshop (20 minutes), and sharing time (5 minutes). One or two students share their writing each day. Given that we have 5 writing periods in a week, by the end of the week all students have had the opportunity to share at least once. Students are encouraged to write by sounding and stretching out the word. The emphasis is on bringing words down on the paper rather than spelling and neatness. During September we completed the first unit, Launching the Writing Workshop. This is our second week of studying unit 2, Small Moments: Personal Narrative Writing. Unit 2 fits well with our focus on community building and learning about communities. When introducing this unit, we talked about the concept of creating a stronger community by building closer relationships. We also discussed the idea of sharing important moments and actions in our life as a way to build closer relationships.

We have agreed that we will work hard to share some of the important moments in our lives through writing and that we will have a big celebration by the end of our unit. By the end of next week students will choose one of their written pieces to publish in our community newsletter. They will work with a community member (one of their peers) to improve their written piece before publishing it. Families are invited to come in on our celebration day. This will be the day where students celebrate their hard work by presenting our community newsletter and reading aloud their stories. Lesson for Wednesday: Internalising story shapes - teaching students how to tell a story across their 5 fingers to make sure they have a beginning, middle, and end. Assessment: in addition to collection observation notes and sample student work, I will use Lucy Calkins rubrics and checklists as assessment tools. Literacy components: phonemic awareness, letter sounds and phonics, oral language, concepts of print, writing convention, reading comprehension, and writing processes and strategies. 11:45 - 12:00 Songs/Rhymes/Riddles/Jokes/Tongue Twisters

We spend our last 15 minutes together on singing, telling jokes, and playing games. This is a great opportunity for students to improve their language skills in a stress free setting. Students volunteer to pick activities from our fun sack filled with songs, rhymes, riddles, jokes, and tongues twisters. We complete the activity as a class. Literacy components: phonemic awareness, letter sounds and phonics, oral language, and comprehension. 12:00 Lunch

My students go back to their regular classrooms after lunch.