Wednesday, September 16, 2009


After much testing...DIBELS! I was able to make my small groups. My lowest group needs lots of phonics instruction as most first graders do. These students are more on the kindergarten level, they don't know their letter names and sounds. I hear a song in my head "lets start from the very beginning, a very good place to start..."

We had a half an hour for this group: started with phonemic awareness... air --- plane, what's the word? quick and easy, we want PA to be more of a game. Then we played pass the site words: see and the. Next, we talked about A and the sound it makes /a/ and its spelling. I gave them a card with letters jumbled and had them find the letter a many times by naming things that started with a. I wrote all their names on the board and we circled the letter a in their names. To end and assess, I had them write the uppercase and lowercase a on a small whiteboard and say the sound.
I know this sounds "elementary" BUT, this is where we start with these students.