By now your children will have settled down and your baseline assessments should be completed. I hope you feel as excited as I do at the prospect of young children learning to read! You have new Talking Stories resources to help you, and if you use them well you WILL significantly raise the levels of reading in your class. This is going to be your best year ever in teaching!
Let’s get cracking with this week’s work:
Level 1
In the classroom this week you will begin teaching the alphabet, doing one letter each day. Start on Monday with the letter ‘a’. By Friday you will have got up to the letter ‘e’. Click HERE or on the “Alphabet” tab at the top of the page, to find pictures that will help you teach each letter sound. You will also find a link to the amazing animated pencil, which is brilliant for teaching letter formation.
Send worksheets home to encourage parents to help with teaching each alphabet sound! Click on the days of the week to find a selection of pages for each alphabet sound:
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
In the computer lab this week you need to teach your children how to log on and double-click on the Talking Stories icon in order to open the programme. Take your time to teach this well. Encourage the children to help each other. This will save you a lot of time in every lesson in future.
Level 2
In the classroom this week you need to assess each child to see whether they recognise all of the alphabet sounds. It is impossible to make progress in reading without this crucial building block. Don’t make the assumption that children will know their alphabet by the time they get to Grade 2. If you need to reteach the alphabet, then use the resources for Level 1 above.
Alphabet Assessment Sheet - This should be done one-to-one with each child. Ask a loving parent or volunteer to help with this in class. Tick each letter that the child knows. Children should be able to recognise the letter sound (‘a’ as in pan), and not necessarily the letter name (‘a’ as in pane).
Homework: Send home Key Words Level 1, List 1 . If your children were using Talking Stories last year, then this will be revision. You could also send home a simple wordsearch each day. Click on the days of the week below for wordsearches that focus on words beginning with the first five letters of the alphabet.
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
In the computer lab this week you should revise logging on with your new class. Run through the computer lab rules that you established last week, and show the children how to open the Talking Stories. Let them explore one or two of the Level 1 stories, just for fun. Let the children choose – you want them to learn how to find their way around the programme, using the menu.
Level 3
In the classroom this week you will be revising key words that your children should be able to read by now.
Level 1, List 1
Level 1, List 2
If there are any children in your class who are still struggling to recognise alphabet sounds, then take time to work with them as a group. Put in place some support so you don’t lose these children! We want everyone to love reading and to make progress in literacy. Use the resources for Levels 1 and 2 above to assist these learners.
Homework this week is to learn to read all the key words that you have revised in class. You could even use these key words for a spelling test on Friday! Send the key word sheets home so that learners can cut out the individual words and learn to read them. HINT: If they don’t cut out the words and muddle them up, then often they simply learn to recite what’s on the sheet, without actually reading each word. So make sure your kids cut the sheets into individual words!
In the computer lab this week
Children will open and read the Level 3 core story called, “The Pink Umbrella.” Let them enjoy following the Talking Story at their own pace and completing one or two of the activities. We will continue with this story next week.