My favorite thing about first grade is how motivated students are to become stronger readers. With hard work, you can witness that "light bulb" moment when reading starts to click. In order to make this happen, we need access to sets of leveled books that we can read in small groups.
We have been working diligently to incorporate differentiated instruction for our literacy block in order to get our students to meet the end of the year standards.
When we started last year with our first graders, there were over 65% of students who were below the benchmark for reading.
Fortunately, we have students who are excited to learn. Our school has limits on classroom sizes of eighteen students. However, these books would be available to all of the English language instruction classrooms, or around 200 students. The student population consists of 42% English-language learners and 57% of students from low-income families. Our school has nearly five hundred students, and only has kindergarten through second-grade. This allows for a variety of opportunities for collaboration among teachers and grouping students for guided reading groups.
My Project
Typically we try to meet with at least two guided reading groups every day for 20 minutes each. These groups are limited to five or six students and usually we focus on a reading skill to model and use on a specific leveled text with the teacher. We typically spend more than one day with each text, rereading for fluency. In these guided reading groups, students learn how to decode words, comprehension strategies, and build confidence with other readers at their same skill set.
The problem that we ran into last year was with the books that were available to our classroom. The most engaging and popular books have been completely worn down, or lost. That left us with books that were not very relevant to our students. When students are excited about reading a book, they are more likely to be motivated to read other books, but there is nothing worse than a boring book when you are just beginning to learn to read.
As a teacher, it is sometimes overwhelming to look at all the progress that your students need to make in order to reach the grade-level standards.
However, this task is made much easier when the appropriate resources are available, and the kids are engaged and excited to read and reread the material. I thank you for supporting my students developing their love of reading to make a better foundation for their lives.
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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 Ms. Sarikaya and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.