What did I get right? How can I improve? Reflections on teaching language arts.

Last year I had my first combo kindergarten & 1st grade class - wow! What an education - that is, we ALL learned a lot! As I find myself reflecting on the challenges and successes, I thought I'd share my thoughts. I hope you'll share what works for you too!

Word reading - The biggest thing has to be following a Science of Reading based curriculum! I got mine from https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/store/droppin-knowledge-with-heidi and highly recommend her materials! Thank you Heidi!


Writing lovely rich stories - daily practice in our journals was a great way to start the year, especially as some of the children needed to learn how to sound out words and represent them with letters. (I created this resource to help with that!)  

Every day I modeled writing for the children: I talked briefly about choosing something they had experienced and had strong feelings about, drew a picture about my topic of the day, then wrote a few sentences about it. I modeled paying attention to the initial letter in the sentence being a capital letter, leaving spaces between words, and using punctuation. As the children learned new skills I incorporated them into my writing process, so I was always talking about and modeling the skills I needed them to concentrate on. 

As the year progressed I implemented an idea I heard on Science of Reading, the Podcast about expanding sentences and adding detail, as a class. In the episode, Judith Hochman Ed.D. talked about teaching children HOW to improve their writing by adding details about who, what, when, where, why, how - and my mind was blown!

The very next day I asked the children to tell me a sentence about an activity we had just completed. They told me, "We made a rainbow." Next I added the question words to our whiteboard, and we went through them one by one, adding each detail to our sentence. The children turned our very basic sentence into something wonderfully detailed: "At school, the kids in our class made a rainbow mystery picture on the 100s chart today." WOW!

Needless to say, those question words remained on our whiteboard for the rest of the year, and we discussed them before and during our writing time each day. I challenged the children to add 1-3 details to their own daily writing, and their sentences became more and more detailed! I often asked them questions  during the writing process, and challenged them to include their answers. Sometimes we got to read our amazing writing out loud to our friends - from the fancy author's chair!

 

Still, those pesky capital letters and punctuation weren't always included in each sentence. (SIGH!) Tell me I'm not the only teacher whose students tuned out words like "capital letter" and "period"! Something had to change - and my editing and proof reading resource was born! 

  

Ahhhh! What a relief when my students finally started remembering to use appropriate capitalization, spacing and punctuation!

The worksheets I created have 4 sentences to fix each week, so we corrected one sentence a day (and had one day off). Here's how we did it:

• I wrote our mistake filled sentence of the day on the white board using a black marker. 
• The children helped me to read it aloud, so we all knew what it was supposed to say.
• I asked everyone to look for any errors they could find, and to raise their hands if they could tell me one thing that needed to be fixed. 
• I called on several kindergarten students first - with my mixed grade classroom I didn't want the older students to find the simplest errors, I wanted the kindergarten kiddos to think about the basics, and the first graders to rise to the challenge of spelling & grammar errors.
• When a student identified a mistake and how to correct it, they got a brightly colored marker to make the correction.
• When all the errors were fixed, the students read the correct sentence to me, and counted how many errors were in the sentence, and what kind of errors they were. This meant that information was fresh in their minds!
• Finally, I sent them to their tables to correct the sentence on their own paper. Once everyone had the sentence written correctly, we celebrated how smart we were! Woot woot! 

Everyone knew how to correct it because we had just completed it together, and everyone was motivated to make all the corrections because we were a team! We were SOOOO smart! We weren't letting that lowercase letter or that silly spelling trick us! Did they still make errors in their own writing? Of course! By the end of the year they were just 5, 6 or 7 years old! 

Those are the things I think I got right, things that really made a difference in our reading and writing. Teaching is a learning journey, and I'm so grateful for the things I learned with these kiddos! Going forward I won't wait until February to start editing practice! I went back and made fix it sentences for the entire year, and made sure I started with the basics and slowly added in more and more skills. Would you like to try it out? Here's a free week, I hope it helps you and your students as much as it helped mine!

 

If you like it, please take a minute to leave me a review - I read every single one, and hearing from other teachers really makes creating and sharing free resources feel like a good use of my time! If you find something less than fantastic, please let me know so I can meet my 5 star review goal!

So what are your tips for making language arts instruction better? Whether it's reading, writing or grammar, what's that one thing that really works for you? Leave me a comment and share what YOU do -I can't wait to hear about it - and maybe implement it in my teaching too!

 Have an amazing day,

Paula