Week 3- First Grade

  • Big and Little (Fiction, Level C) by Joy Cowley
  • Counting Seeds (Non-fiction, Level C) by Margie Burton
  • Skeletons (Non-fiction, Level C) by Jane Buxton
  • I’m Brave (Fiction, Level C) by Pauline Cartwright
  • To Town (Fiction, Level C) by Joy Cowley

This week with AlphaSkills was definitely an adventure. From counting the seeds in different types of fruits and talking about baby animals being born to looking at real skeletons and talking about overcoming fear, this week was packed with learning! Some of my favorite moments were listening to my little first grader talk about how baby animals are born in spring but baby humans can be born anytime from Big and Little, seeing how excited he was about informing the whole family that crabs wear their skeletons on the outside from Skeletons, watching him draw the most ferocious dog I’ve ever seen to illustrate the sentence “I’m not scared of dogs” from I’m Brave, and hearing what he thought about the word vintage in To Town. I wouldn’t miss this adventure for the world!

The activity I want to highlight this week is the Structural Analysis/Punctuation/Grammar activity in Step 2 B. of the Read with Sarah model. This step is meant to help first graders develop word recognition and phonics skills, and with the book I‘m Brave we learned about contractions and syllables. It was so fun seeing his little face light up every time he learned to squish two words together to make a contraction and every time he clapped out the syllables to a word and shouted out the correct number. I believe these are skills that could be taught to first graders in a number of ways, but I am personally so glad to be teaching my little guy in this way because it is fun for both of us and it builds the confidence he needs to reach new levels in reading independently.

Learning to read with confidence and independence really should be an adventure, and with AlphaSkills I know we’re in for one every single week. For more information about the AlphaSkills Read with Sarah curriculum and our family, see the AlphaSkills Blog Introduction.