SHORT Video: One Day of Centers beginning of April

For most of the school year, my small group instruction on Thursdays has involved some sort of writing. We had Listen and Spell activities to work on writing CVC words:

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Then we moved into Listen and Spell Sentences:

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After a couple of months of these, we switched back to spelling single words that included some of our advanced phonics. We did this for a few weeks and it proved to not only serve well as a way to apply advanced phonics and improve spelling but also to clean up the students’ handwriting (which did indeed transfer over to writing at different times of the day).

Last week, my teammate and I talked and decided that since it is now the fourth quarter of school, we need to incorporate some reading comprehension work into our small group instruction. We looked at our small group instruction weekly plan and realized that Thursdays would be the best day for this. In the video, you’ll see that there isn’t much writing but there is a little. You’ll also see how we’re continuing to work on decoding and practicing our heart words but also expecting the students to think a bit more about what they’re reading. Most likely, this is how we’ll finish out the rest of the Thursdays this school year.