Reading Service Learning Project Underway!

About three weeks ago, Ms. Sickels and I started a reading service learning project with all of her reading students.

Our project focuses on assisting and improving first grade reading skills. Our middle school students started this project off by gaining a better understanding of first grade students. The reading students watched sections of different videos that displayed first grade students in their classroom. They also had the opportunity to watch a lesson that was done in Mr. Erickson's first grade classroom at Inman Primary. Next, our reading students read an article that focused on first grade skills, and then answered the following questions in class:

1. List a few examples of ways in which you can get a first graders interested in reading.

2. What are the different purposes for reading that first graders should learn about?

3. What skills were mentioned that you could go over with first graders? (what should they know about a book and about reading at this point?)

4. What are ways in which you can review and teach letter sound relationships with first graders?

5. What are some ways in which first graders often show what they comprehend from a book that they have read?

6. What are the important things to take into account when reading aloud to a first grader?

7. What are some skills that you can review/teach while doing a shared reading with first graders? What are some materials you might use when reading to first graders?

8. Compare the skills that first graders are expected to know and be able to perform by the end of first grade to the skills that you currently work on and exhibit. What are your thoughts when you compare the two levels of learning? Are you surprised at what first graders are expected to know? Are you surprised about the comparison between first grade and your current grade? Why or why not?

 Next, our reading students started preparing  a first grade reading lesson and began creating first grade learning games. The lesson plans that our students have been creating focus on one of the following Common Core First Grade Standards:

Literature\Key Ideas and Detail 

1. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.1.2 Retell stories, including key details, and demonstrate understanding of their central message or lesson.

2. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.1.3 Describe characters, settings, and major events in a story, using key details.

Informational Texts\Key Ideas and Details 

1. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.1.1 Ask and answer questions about key details in a text.

2. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.1.2 Identify the main topic and retell key details of a text. Craft and Structure

3. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.1.5 Know and use various text features (e.g., headings, tables of contents, glossaries, electronic menus, icons) to locate key facts or information in a text.

The learning games that our students have been creating focus on digraphs, sight words, blends, and endings.

We will be taking three of our classes to Inman Primary this week and next so that they can  present their lessons to the first graders in Mr. Erickson's class, Mrs. Dunn's Class, Mrs. Graber's class, and Mrs. Dolch's class. The learning games will be brought to Inman as well so that students in all of the first grade classrooms can enjoy them before the end of the school year.

After the games were set and ready to go, our middle school students tested them one last time by playing them with a partner.