Guided Reading provides a chance for the teacher to work with small groups of children who are at similar places in their reading journey.  Classrooms typically have a two year (or more) range of readers within any given group.  The following is a small taste of what we do during Guided Reading.  Our small groups support the children in learning to be comfortable with predicting what a story might be about, using a variety of strategies to determine unknown words, focusing on comprehension of the material being read, discussing why characters act the way they do, and relating the stories to experiences in their own lives.  The Guided Reading groups are flexible and ever changing, as are the reading skills of these young children. The books we work with are leveled; with A through J being typical grade one levels and J through M being typical grade two levels.  All students learn to be meaningfully engaged with independent activities during the time the classroom teachers’ work with small groups.  These activities include Reading to Self, Reading to Others, Writing, Word Wall work and Listening to Someone.

The students will all be bringing home Word Wall words (spelling words) on a weekly basis.  The children are expected to both read and spell these words.  We will be sending these words home on Fridays, and working with them in class the following week. 

Mathematics  

We will begin the year by looking at several different areas of math, largely working with patterns, sorting and number concepts.  I will typically be addressing the same strands in math for each grade.  Grade one and two connect very well and this provides a manageable way of introducing topics and then moving on to differentiate what each grade is expected to learn.  I have lined up the present and upcoming Learning Outcomes for each grade below.