READING

 As a teacher, my goal is to foster a love of reading in each child and to teach them how to construct significant meaning from text that is read to them and that they've read independently.

The first grade reading curriculum was developed based on the McGraw-Hill reading series. 

The components are:

• Alphabetic Principle: to be able to associate sounds with letters and to use the sounds to form words
• Phonemic Awareness: to be able to hear and manipulate sounds in words
• Vocabulary:  to be able to understand and use words to acquire and convey meaning
• Fluency:  to be able to automatically and effortlessly read words in text
• Sight Words: to be able to automatically recognize instructed sight words
• Comprehension:  to be able to interact with text to derive and convey meaning

I also use books like Kathy Collins' Growing Readers and Debbie Miller's Reading with Meaning to create effective mini-lessons to help guide our comprehension strategies. 

They are:

• Making Connections: using our schema (background knowledge and experiences) to make text-to-text and text-to-self connections
• Asking Questions: asking and answering questions to gain meaning
• Visualizing: to create mental images utilizing our senses
• Determining Importance: to be able to identify some concepts (i.e. words, events, characters, etc.) as more important to the overall comprehension
• Inferring: to be able to make predictions and draw conclusions in line with background knowledge and/or text

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