First Grade Reading Instruction

In a comprehensive reading curriculum, instructional approaches include daily guided reading, reading aloud to students, shared reading, independent reading (including silent reading), opportunities for students to share reading and writing with one another, and reading/writing across the curriculum.

Daily Guided Reading Instruction includes instruction in the areas of Comprehension, Fluency, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, and Vocabulary at each student's instructional level. Instruction is based on the sophistication of the reader and the complexity and difficulty of the informational and narrative texts being read. Models of reading instruction progress from Read Alouds to Shared Reading to Guided Reading .

Explicit strategy instruction includes:

Reading Strategies: Using Concepts of Print, Print-processing Systems, Self-monitoring, and Fix-up Strategies

and

Comprehension Strategies : Clarifying, Connecting/Schema, Determining Importance, Inferring, Questioning, Summarizing, Synthesizing, and Visualizing.

When helping your child read at home, several strategies may be used to aid in decoding unknown words.

1. Tell the child to look at the picture. You may tell the child the

word is something that can be seen in the picture, if that is the

case.

2. Tell the child to look for chunks in the word, such as it in sit,

at in mat, or and and ing in standing.

3. Ask the child to get his/her mouth ready to say the word by

shaping the mouth for the beginning letter.

4. Ask the child if the word looks like another word s/he knows.

Does bed look like red?, for example.

5. Ask the child to go on and read to the end of the sentence.

Often by reading the other words in context, the child can

figure out the unknown word.

6. If the child says the wrong word while reading, ask questions

like:

Does it make sense?

Does it sound right?

Does it look right?

Questions you may ask your child while reading the story...

Tell the main things that have happened so far.
What do you think the authors message will be?
What is the problem in the story? Why?
What do you think will happen next?
How do you feel at this point in the story? Why?

Questions you may ask your child after reading the story...

Who are the main characters?
Describe the main character in the story?
Choose one character, why was this character important in the story?
Where does the story take place?
Describe the setting?
What is the first thing you thought of after hearing the story?
How did the story make you feel?
Tell me what happened in the story?
When you close your eyes, what picture from the story comes into your mind? (or draw a picture)
What does the story make you remember about something that happened to you? Why?
What does the author want us to think about in this story?
What was your favorite part of this story?
What do you think was the most important part of the story?
What would you like to ask the author?
Which part of the story did you not understand or have a question about?
Did you like this story? Why or why not?
Does this story remind you of any others?
If you could change the ending of this story how would you end it?
What happened in the beginning, middle or end of the story?
Does this story give you any ideas for a story you would like to write? If so, what?