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Materials:

White paper

Pencil or pen

String

Scissors

Glue or tape

Hole punch

Cups, plates, and treats for the tea party (optional)

What You Do:

1. On a blank piece of paper, write out a sentence that fits the reading level of your child. You may want to write something positive about your child, or an example of good manners at a tea party.

2. Cut out each of the words in the sentence so that each word is separate from one another. Make sure that the words are big enough for your child to pick up and read easily, but no wider or longer than 2 inches so that they fit comfortably into the tea bag.

3. Now, prepare the bags of tea. Take your sheet of white paper and measure out a 6” x 3” rectangle. Cut it out and fold it in half so that your fold creates 2 3” x 3” squares. Unfold the rectangle.

4. Place the pieces of your sentence in a stack inside the folded rectangle at the fold.

5. Refold the rectangle and glue the open edges together. You should now have a pouch with the words of the sentence held inside. Set the "word pouch" aside for the glue to dry.

6. Once the glue is dry, punch a hole into the top of the pouch and tie a string to the hole to finish the tea bag. The string should be about as long as your hand from the tip of your middle finger to your wrist.

7. Now you and your child are ready for your tea party! Prepare your child's desired accompaniments, such as tea and cookies, then give your child her bag of "word tea."

8. While she's sipping her real tea, help her open the word pouch up, and watch her put together the pieces of her sentence. When she’s finished, she can read the sentence to you!

Consider making several tea bags with sentences that fit together, such as the beginning of your child's favorite story. Once she has figured out each individual sentence, your child can order the sentences to make sense of the story. This is a fun and easy game that you can tailor specifically to your child’s reading needs!

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What is the aim of this activity?  Work on previewing and contextualizing strategies.

1. Pick several newspaper or magazine articles and cut them so that the headline is separate from the article.

2. Children have to keep on fishing until they match up all the headlines to their respective articles! This game can be played individually or in groups as if it was a competition.

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Activity 4: Play Story Ball: A Reading Comprehension Game

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Activity 4: Play Story Ball: A Reading Comprehension Game

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For this activity we will need the following materials:

beach ball

permanent marker

first grade level book (or a story from your child's reading textbook)

pencil

lined paper

1. Using the marker, grab the beach ball and ask your child to write one of the following questions in each of the colored sections of the ball: "Where?" "Who?" "Beginning?" "Middle?" "End?" and “Favorite part?"

2. Once the ball is marked up, take it outside for a game of catch. In the game of Story Ball, each time you toss your child the ball, he must answer the question written on the color which lands under his right hand. Where did the story take place? Who were the main characters? What happened in the beginning, in the middle, in the end? What was his favorite part? Toss the ball back and forth—the quicker, the better, since that makes answering in time more fun and silly. If your child can’t recall an event from the story give him some clues.

3. Play continues until all the questions have been answered. If you’d like to extend the activity, ask your child to write down what he’s said aloud on paper, then illustrate it. This is another great way to help him recall the events of a story and understand what he’s read

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In order to work one of the strategies explained before, which is scanning, we can propose the following activity. It is a reading exercise that consists in showing the class this PowerPoint slide about jobs. Divide the class into groups and give each group 2-3 questions to answer. You can use the same questions that appear on the right but in a different order. Each group must scan the text to find the information they need to answer the questions.

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This is a good activity for first grade students, so all we need is a picture book with clear, fairly large print that your child likes and has read with you at least once before and small post-it flag papers.

Once we have chosen the book, the have to take out ten post.it flags and with them, cover ten initial letters throughout the book. For example “Peter Pan _isited Wendy”.

As we read, we will open to the pages where we have placed the flags.  Although we will be doing the main reading, we have to invite our first grade students to tell us: what letter goes at the beginning of those words? She/he can then lift the flag and see immediately if she/he was right.

When the level of the students go up we can try with different levels: Level one, single letters. Level two, words that start with two letters together, as chair (cover “ch”). Level three, two vowels that go together, in chair (cover “ai”). Level four, cover entire words.

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Read the recipe.

Chocolate cake

1 (18.25 ounce) package devil's food cake mix

1 (5.9 ounce) package instant chocolate pudding mix

1 cup sour cream

1 cup vegetable oil

4 eggs

1/2 cup warm water

2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).

2. In a large bowl, mix together the cake and pudding mixes, sour cream, oil, beaten eggs and water. Stir in the chocolate chips and pour batter into a well greased 12 cup bundt pan.

3. Bake for 50 to 55 minutes, or until top is springy to the touch and a wooden toothpick inserted comes out clean. Cool cake thoroughly in pan at least an hour and a half before inverting onto a plate If desired, dust the cake with powdered sugar.

Now, we have some questions

How many sugar spoons do we have to add to the recipe?

In which temperature do we have to preheat the oven? (C)

So, as you can see, when we (as teachers) ask to the students to read something without saying which is the aim of the reading or without giving clues of where they have to focus their attention, they just read everything in a general way, without paying attention to the small details.