Students will sit at their desks and I will lay out a few familiar laminated pictures in front of each student and let them know I will be using “snail talk” or “slow-motion” talk, meaning I will be slowly dragging out the names of the items in a funny voice, and they will be silently holding up; the image of the word I am attempting to say. Their goal is to guess the name of the item or picture in question before I finish saying the word. For children who may be slower at finding the image, we may drag out the word more and/or give clues or cues to the word so that they may gain understanding.

Heggerty’s website provides in depth information, research, findings, and videos on phonemic awareness, the skills students must work through to succeed and how we can all make a difference, as well as immense amounts of fun activities to try at home. The resource provides activities to enhance phonemic awareness through rhyming, first sound, and letter name sounds for parents to effortlessly apply at home that can make all the difference in understanding. In addition, the website provides in depth information on the Heggerty curriculum and how it empowers educators and families to create lifelong readers. 

The NAEYC provides ways of introducing vocabulary anytime anywhere during simple everyday activities that you can do together to reinforce learning. This page provides ways of introducing vocabulary on the playground, at the grocery store, in the kitchen, and around he neighborhood so that children of any background may progress. 

I will begin by informing students to pay attention to the plot of the story while I project The Three Little Pigs book on out large screen and read the passage to the classroom as a whole, showing full expression, pointing as I read for those kids who may need to stay focused. Students will then be asked to reflect on the story followed by taking their seats to fill out a story maps on their own. The visual helps students see that stories have a starting point, a ‘journey’ or middle, and an ending point which also helps them to recall and prompts them to pay attention to and provide as many details as possible. The story map may look as simple as:

 

Story Title:
BEGINNING | ⇒ | MIDDLE | ⇒ | END
(The story starts when-) |  ⇒  | (After that-) |  ⇒  | (The story ends-)

This is a fun one where I will begin by asking students who the characters are. In the story and asking them to draw out the characters, including as many details as possible. This will allow students to not only use their creativity but to visualize the story and then use their thoughts to tell me about the characters in their story and what they may be doing in their drawing. Students may then write their own sentences about the characters from the story or tell me the sentence to have my help writing their description. 

1. Characters: who was in the story?

2. Setting: where did the story take place?

3. Events: what happened in the story?

4. End: how did the story end?

5. Favorite character or part of the story