Chapter 3 - The Next Step in Guided Reading - Freebies

Welcome to chapter three of the Freebielicious Summer book study.  I'm hosting this week's chapter along with my good buddies Marsha, Jeannie and Lidia.

       

This chapter is huge.  There is so much information in it.  I decided to concentrate on the Pre-A group.  This will be the group that I will be teaching in the fall.  Some of the children in my group may not even have a yes/no response let alone know any letters of the alphabet.

I was really interested in information about tracing an alphabet book.  I have never done this before but I'm really interested by this concept and I'm excited to see if it works.  I made this booklet to give it a try.  You can click on the picture to grab the colour version for free.

The Pre-A Lesson Framework consists of Working with Letters and Names, Working with Sounds, Working with Books and Interactive Writing.

Each lesson starts by assessing the letter and sound knowledge of each student in the group.  I made up this chart but I might make up another one with all the children on one page.  If you want this one, you can grab it for free by clicking on the picture below.

Each child is suppose to have an alphabet chart so I made one of those too.  The pictures match the ones in the alphabet tracing book.  You can grab the black and white version below.

For "Working with Letters and Names", I'm going to make name templates for each of the children and get together personal letter bags for each of them.  I just ordered a bunch of new magnetic letters.  Again, names are not something I've spent a lot of time working on, so this will be new to me.  I think I'm going to be starting out with a pet theme.  We are going to be doing a lot of working with letters.  Picking out certain letters an sorting them.  This activity is from my pet literacy unit.

"Working with Sounds" will involve a lot of work on syllables and word families.  Finding lots of rhyming words too.  I'm going to have to make it very simple and use a lot of picture supports for this group.

 I have quite a few interactive books that will be perfect for "Working with Books".  I have four different types of books.  One is a regular book.

One has the sentence missing and the children need to put the right sentence on each page.

 

One has the animal missing and the children read the sentence and find the right animal.

 And the last one has a word missing and the children have to put the right word in the story.

Since it's more than likely that none of group will have any fine motor skills, the fact that  "Interactive Writing"  is using cut up sentences is going to work out perfectly.  I don't have any made up for pets yet but I think I will make some up like I did for my zoo unit.

I love the way that the book lays out a lesson plan for the whole group.  I know that when I go to do my planning in the fall, that I just have to pick the activities I'm going to do and slot them into the lesson plan.  I'm looking forward to being more organized.

If you want all my alphabet activities, including the colour and black and white versions of the book and chart, you can find them here, along with the matching alphabet posters.