Welcome Back!

It was lovely to see all the Lower Elementary students back at Acera on Monday. They came back full of stories from the vacation week including multi-night sleepovers, exciting waterparks, and skiing adventures. Some children just really enjoyed “hanging out on the couch”. However your family spent the week, the children didn’t loose any momentum coming back. The energy and excitement about reading, telling stories, drawing, and our theme “Tiny Houses” has increased! Seeing the class reunite was a beautiful thing… while reading “If You Lived Here” by Giles Laroche, one child said “What if WE all lived together in the same house! We could play together every day!

Reading

It is perfectly typical of children in K-1-2 to want to read Chapter Books. The thick books that they see you read! They want to be accomplished readers concuring content (and many, many pages) because they believe that more is better! It is not surprising that when I came back from vacation with all the readers, or instructional reading texts, labeled by difficulty A-R, the students wanted to read the R’s. Just to give perspective, K-3 books are leveled Emergent-Level L, and that is the place where most of the Lower Elementary students can decode, comprehend, and appreciate the stories.

I have a couple of favors….

1. Please refrain from sending in books from home. Oftentimes they are amazing and appropriate, but we are providing books that are at the “just right” instructional level for your individual child. When books come that I am not familiar with, it is hard to determine on-the-spot if it is appropriate or at the right level. We have over 300 catalogued and labeld books… more than enough for the year!

2. Use a bookmark to underline text at home. If your child is reading at home, please encourage reading every word… overall our children want to rush ahead to consume the storyline without reading/understanding each word. Using a piece of paper or a bookmark to underline each line of text helps your child to isolate the words on the page. This will help with comprehension, vocabulary absorption, and spelling patterns.

3. Read to your child each night. At this time of literacy development, children need a rich diet of vocabulary, complex storylines and characters, and watching you point to words as you read. Just the act of watching your finger tracking across the page helps your child with the right to left progression that they need while reading. It only takes 15-20 minutes, but the long-term benefits are tremendous. If there are older siblings at home, they can be instructed on how to read-aloud to your LE student!

4. Always stop the Read-A-Loud for unfamiliar words. We tell the children that we will take questions, comments, and connections after the story is finished so all the children will get the flow of the story. However, if children are unfamiliar with a word, they are always welcome to ask a question!! We used the children’s collective knowledge about words like Adobe, or desert, that came up while reading this week. They know so much! At home they are relying on you to build their vocabulary.

Messy Art Saturday!