Love to learn! I have a great responsibility to these young first grade minds. It is my goal and challenge to not only teach my students to read and write but to teach them to love to read and write!
My students come to me eager to learn.
Their individual abilities vary greatly from being fluent readers to those working on basic phonics sounds and sight words. Some are overflowing with confidence and others are nervous and unsure that they will ever learn how to read. It is my job to work within each student’s ability level and bring them forward while maintaining interest and motivation.
My Project
I would like to provide my students with a puppet theater to be used with an educational twist – You need to write the screenplay for your puppets before you can act it out! This is going to be a great hit while promoting writing, reading, editing, and oral fluency – Wow!
I can see this as a venue for conflict resolution as well – they can write about and act out their everyday social interactions and conflicts and practice problem solving through puppetry.
I would also like to use the puppet theater to promote the students reading and speaking fluency through reader’s theater – these are pre-made scripts written to the student’s individual reading level used to promote re-reading text orally until it sounds fluent. Students need to hear themselves sounding like “real” readers but often don’t like to practice reading the same text over – this provides a motivating excuse to do just that!
I am always looking for ways to motivate my first grade students to read and write.
I have never met a first grader that did not love a puppet show! Put the two together – awesome! My students will leave first grade with a love of reading and writing!
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Mastriana and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
