LITERACY IN THE CLASSROOM

September 2016

Ms. Roes Grade One Class Newsletter

Dear Parents or Guardians,

I am looking forward to working with you to help your child develop
literacy skills throughout the school year. As your childs teacher I will
help engage students by providing a variety of books in my classroom
and a variety of comprehension strategies, so I can meet each childs
literacy needs.

Literacy is the ability,

confidence, and wiliness
to engage with language
to acquire, construct,

One of my favourite parts about being a teacher is reading picture

and communicate
books together as a class to engage students in literacy. My hope is
that your child will not simply learn to read, but will read to learn. I also meaning in all aspects
hope to involve you and other community members in our literacy
of daily living...
experiences, because I believe everyone can help foster literacy in our
classroom.
- Alberta Education 2010
-Ms. Jazmin Roe

In This Issue

Fostering literacy is key to helping engage children in reading.

Why Reading is
Essential to Student
Learning

Components of
Learning to Read

Literacy Activities

Comprehension
Strategies

Literature for the

Classroom

Ms. Roes Top Picks

to Read at Home

Components of
Learning to
Read

Decoding is a part of phonics and

phonemic awareness. While phonics
is the connection between sounds
and letters, phonemic awareness is
the understanding that words are
created from phonemes. (K12Reader, 2016)

Vocabulary Development is word

knowledge. As students gain a
stronger vocabulary, they learn to
connect their oral vocabularies to
their reading vocabularies by adding
new words to their repertoires (K12Reader, 2016). This is an ongoing
process.

Fluency is practicing reading to

increase speed. It requires students
to use multiple reading skills at the
same time. Fluency is important in
oral readings, but also in silent readings (K-12Reader, 2016).

Comprehension is understanding
what a text is about. It is developing
strategies and helping students to
use them in a self-regulated manner.
It involves putting words together and
using prior knowledge to develop
meaning (K-12Reader, 2016).

As a parent, you can be involved in your childs learning!

Why Reading is Essential to

Student Learning
Stronger literacy skills are associated with higher income, better health, and
greater social and civic engagement. (Alberta Education, 2010)
Literacy is a shared responsibility and can be fostered by everyone. Educators,
school authorities, parents, communities, and students have to work together to
foster literacy development for students of all ages and abilities (Alberta Education, 2010).

Here are a few important reasons why reading is essential to student learning:

Literacy skills are needed in all subjects and grades (Alberta Education,
2010).

Literacy helps create life-long learners and engage students in the learning
process.

Learners with strong literacy skills, acquire, create, connect and communicate
meaning in a wide variety of contexts (Alberta Education, 2010).

Students will develop reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing and representing skills (Alberta Education, 2015).

Student can learn to be fluent in different types of literacy such as videos,

images, reading, technology, etc.

Students can develop skills to understand each subjects literacy, such as

breaking down math problems by finding key words.

Teaches students how to make critical judgements about the accuracy and
ethical use of information they require (Alberta Education, 2010).

Reading is knowing.

Literacy Activities
1. Daily Writing Prompts
As a class, we will have 1520 minutes of daily writing
prompts. These prompts
will be self-selected, class
selected, or selected from
our readings.
2. Daily 5 Students will have
the opportunity to work on 5
reading comprehension
tasks including: read to self,
work on writing, partner
reading, word work and
listening to reading.
(Dymock and Nicholson,
2010)
3. CAF Goal setting is an
important part of developing
reading strategies. Students will be able to set
goals in the following categories: comprehension,
accuracy, fluency and expanding vocabulary.
(Dymock and Nicolson,
2010)
4. Reading Buddies As a
school, Grade One students will be paired with
Grade Five students in our
Reading Buddies program.
Students will learn to mentor, learn strategies from
other students, and learn to
work with others. This is
also an opportunity for students to create friendships
with other students in the
school.

Students will develop individual strategies to further understand literacy.

10 Comprehension Strategies
1.

Vocabulary: Students will learn sight vocabulary that they will recognize easily and
accurately. Students will also learn meaning vocabulary, so they understand the
meaning of different words. (Smith, 2009)

2.

Text Structure: Students will learn the structural elements of setting, characters,
problems and events. They will also see how different types of text are structured
(Smith, 2009).

3.

Predicting: Students will incorporate their background knowledge to make informed

predictions about what information the passage will cover (Smith, 2009).

4.

Clarifying: Students will purposefully look for words and concepts whose meaning
is unclear or unfamiliar (Smith, 2009).

5.

Questioning: Students will generate their own questions as they read, so they can
construct their own deeper meaning (Smith, 2009).

6.

Summarizing: Students will distinguish the most important information in the text to
organize a clear summary of text content (Smith, 2009).

7.

Visualizing: Students will create mental images of the story or information content
as they read (Dymock and Nicholson, 2010).

8.

Decoding/Phonetics: Students will learn to classify different speech sounds and

put them together to make meaning.

9.

Listening: Students will better understand what is being said and will increase their
ability to communicate (Oral Comprehension in the SL Classroom, 2014).

10. Writing: Students will practice writing daily to develop skills and find their interests
through different topics (Boushey & Moser, 2012).

Literature for the Classroom

Pete the Cat Series by James Dean and Eric Litwin. This series
has a variety of e-books, picture books, and song books. In the
book from the Pete the Cat Series, Rocking My School Shoes,
helps students discover different places at school. Pete the Cat
explores places such as the library, the lunchroom, and the playground. This series has online activities for students, videos, and
games to help engage students in literacy. Here is the following link
to explore this series with your child: www.petethecatbooks.com
ABC of Canada by Canadian author Kim Bellefontaine. A picture
book that will take students on a journey across Canada from A-Z.
Theyll visit Canadian landmarks, such as Jasper National Park and
learn about different Canadian symbols. This book will tie in with our
Social Studies unit on communities and has simple language that all
readers can enjoy.
The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt. This picture book will
help Grade One students in Science (creating colour), Art (colours
and objects), and English Language Arts (letter writing, punctuation,
tone/voice). Students can also learn more about emotions and laugh
as they learn about what crayons are thinking when they are used for
colouring. This book also has online activities that we will be exploring
in class: http://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/programs/gep/crayons/crayonsmain.html

Contact:
If you have any questions
or concerns about the
information in this newsletter please contact me
Ms. Jazmin Roe
4051 Riverstone Avenue
Lethbridge, AB T1K 36O
Riverstone School:
(403) 555-0123
Email:
ms.jazminroe@gmail.com

There is no skill
on earth that
children want to
acquire more than
reading.
-Dr. Marion Bank

Ms. Roes Top Picks to Read at Home

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. This picture book is both written and illustrated by Eric Carle.
The author designs his picture books for very young children and this book is his best known work. It
has been translated into more than 25 languages. Carles books are very interactive and engaging for
young children. Many of his books have additional dimensions such as die-cut pages, collages, and
folding pages. This is one of my personal favourites from when I was a young child and is still a well
know picture book today.
Audrey by Dan Bar-el. This chapter book is a tale for the whole family to enjoy! Students in Grade One can still
enjoy the wide range of characters and the different perspectives of the events in this chapter book. Older children will also enjoy this book because of the humour and characters as well. The chapters are short first-person
passages to help move the story along and present a range of reading levels. It is my hope that you and your
children will predict what will happen in each following chapter, because each chapter has a cliff hanger about
what will happen next.

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Joffe Numeroff. This tale is a New York Times best-selling picture
book. It is the first introduction to Mouse, the main character of the If You Give series. Young readers will
laugh about the antics and adventures of this mouse. Readers will love the main character and think of their
own ideas about what would happen if you gave a mouse a cookie. They will also enjoy the colourful illustrations on each page. I would strongly recommend the other books in this series because the language used
throughout the book is a good start for beginning readers.