By Kimberly Crossman

Early Literacy

Letters &Sounds

PhonemicAwareness

Interesting Words

Print Concepts

Language Concepts

Desire to Learn to Read &

Write

Building BlocksKindergarten Program

Desire To Learn To Read & WriteCreate an environment where all students see themselves becoming independent readers and writers through a variety of developmentally appropriate activities.

Language ConceptsFoster the ability to read and write words through the use of morning messages, journal entries, sentence building activities, and environmental print.

Print ConceptsTeach print concepts by modeling how to write and participating in shared reading and shared writing experiences.

Phonemic AwarenessDevelop phonemic awareness, including the concept of rhyme, through activities with poetry, rhyming books, tongue twisters, and playing with language.

Interesting WordsExtend the list of real-life words that students find personally relevant, such as favorite restaurant names, favorite cartoon characters, and family members.

Letters & SoundsEncourage letter and sound recognition through activities with alphabet books, beginning and ending sounds, and shared writing of predictable charts.

The Four BlocksGrade level 1-3

How does it work:

Guided Reading

Teacher works with a small group.

Children in the group are similar in their development of a reading process and are able to read about the same level of text.

Each child reads the whole text.

The goal is for each child to read independently and silently.

The emphasis is on reading increasingly challenging books over time.

Children are grouped and regrouped in a dynamic process that involves ongoing observation and assessment.

Guided Reading: is a context in which a teacher supports each reader’s development of effective strategies for processing novel texts at increasingly rates.

Guided reading lessons usually have a before-reading phase, a during reading phase, and a after reading phase.

Before reading phase: helps children build and access prior knowledge, and make connections to personal experiences, develop vocabulary essential for comprehension, make predictions, and set purpose for their reading.

After reading Phase: helps children connect new knowledge to what they knew before, follow up predictions, and discuss what they learned and how they are becoming better readers by using these reading strategies.

Many different kinds of reading formats are: The whole class reads together and the teacher uses shared reading, choral reading, echo reading, everyone reads to encourage all participation.

Other groups include: Partners, playschool groups, Book Club groups, Think-Aloud groups, and coaching groups. Couching groups is when the teacher has small groups and reads a selection with them while the other children read the selection in partners or individually.

The goal of the Guided Reading Block are:

To teach comprehension skills and strategies.

To develop background knowledge, meaning vocabulary, and oral language.

To teach children how to read all typed of literature.

To provide as much instructional-level reading as possible.

To maintain the motivation and self-confidence of struggling readers.

Self selected Reading: “Individualized reading or personalized reading.”Children get to choose what they want to readDecide to what parts of reading they want to respondOpportunities are provided to share and respond to what is readTeachers hold conferences with Children about their books.Reading is multilevel

The Goal of self selected Reading:To introduce children to all types of literature through the teacher read-aloud.To encourage children’s reading interests.To provide instructional-level reading.To build intrinsic motivation for reading.

Working With Words:Children learn to read and spell high-frequency words.

Children learn the patterns which allow them to decode and spell lots of words.First ten minutes of the block are given to review the “Word Wall" words.

Students practice new and old words daily by looking at them, chanting the letters, writing the words, and self-correcting the words with the teacher.

Last 15-25 minutes of word is time is given to some activities like: Words sorting and hunting, making words, rounding up rhymes, and guess the covered word.

The Goal of Working With Words:To teach children how to read and spell high-frequency words.To teach children how to decode and spell lots of other words using patterns from known words.To have students automatically and fluently use phonics and spelling patterns while reading and writing.

Fun ways to teach:

Independent Fluent Reading

Language Structure and Visual Information:

Helps students anticipate and look at each word , checking their predictions with the print.

Self Monitoring:

Students check on their own reading using meaning, syntax, or visual information.

Cross Checking:

Seen in problem solving behavior in children. Strategic work or thought is going on in their head.

Self Correcting: Correcting through predicting, monitoring and searching for additional information.

Writing(main focus area)

Self-Selected Reading(30-40 min every day)

Working with Words(focuses on big words)

The Big Blocks

Grade level 4-8Guided Reading and Writing are longer blocks.

These two blocks are intergraded withthe content subjects of science,health, and social studies.

Children who do not read and write fluently at third grade level need more instruction time in the four blocks framework.

(Children who have not gotten appropriate Instruction, moved from school to school, or are just learning English.

Until children learn to read and write fluently at third-grade level they need two hours of literacy instruction each day and equal attention to all four blocks.

http://www.four-blocks.com/kindergarten.htm

Guided Reading: The Four-blocks Way: The Four Blocks Literacy Model Book Series (Four Blocks Series) by Patricia Cunningham, Dorothy P. Hall, and James W. Cunningham: Carson-Dellosa Publishing Company, Inc; 2000

Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children by Irene C. Fountas , Gay Su Pinnell; 1996