Languagearts

Language Arts play a very important part in our school day. LA includes oral language--increasing our vocabulary, speaking our thoughts, learning poems, assuming parts and acting in skits. It includes reading--
reading from big books together, called shared reading. The children can follow the words, learn to go from left to right, top to bottom, predict what might happen, and learn to recognize new words. It includes guided reading later this year, when children who are ready will have the experience of reading emergent reader books which have a sentence or two on each page. We will work on strategies of learning new words, getting ideas from the pictures to predict new words, and learning to read independently. LA also includes writing. Forming the letters is a small part of writing, but more important, is putting ideas into print. Thinking and spelling by listening to the sounds of words, helps children get ideas into print. Phonemic awareness is awareness of the small sounds of our language. This is essential for success in reading. We will listen for rhyming sounds, words that begin with the same sounds, and much more.

We read big books every day for a week. These books that we can see together, help us to learn about authors, illustrators, moving from left to right when reading, looking for letters, and much more. Here are our big books for the second week of school. We have 2 versions of The Wheels on the Bus which we compared, and a book about starting school.

Katie is holding our book that we read at the end of the day.

We read charts everyday also.

The children make a small book each week to take home and read to the family.

Each day we read one of the children's names in different ways.

After we spent a day chanting each child's name, we began cheering each child's name. This gives us another opportunity to spell each other's name and learn to recognize the names each time we see them.

The children are using small stuffed toys with Velcro to act out the story Corduroy about a teddy bear while listening to the story on tape.

We are learning to recognize different ways of writing letters. It is especially important to recognize g and g, and a and a. Michealla is using letters to write her name using many different fonts.

While studying farms, the children learned the different sounds that animals make. They could read several farm books with ease.

The children are practicing writing by writing their friends names. They could use name cards or copy the names from our class chart.