Reading is OH, So Sweet!

This week was so much fun and again flew by fast as we began our first story in our reading curriculum - Henry and Mudge by Cynthia Rylant. We voted on which pet would be a good pet and then graphed our results and it turns out more of the students would prefer to have a cat as a pet rather than a dog (we even had a few students who voted on a snake as a pet...yikes!). Also during our reading time this past week, we began what we call Guided Reading Groups which are small groups of students who are led by a teacher or a teacher's aid to help with the five components of reading, which are:

• Phonemic Awareness - or in other words knowing our letters and their sounds
• Phonics - which is the blending of letters together to form words
• Vocabulary - knowing and being able to explain the meanings of words 
• Comprehension - understanding the sequence and story elements of a story, and
• Fluency - which is how smoothly and quickly a reader is able to read

Here are a few pics of our second grade sweeties participating in their Literacy Stations which follow their Guided Reading Groups:

And before I sign off for today, I just have to post a quick pick of the class getting serious about their reading in the computer lab. We are deep into Raz-Kids which is an amazing online reading program that helps students develop in all five areas of reading that I mentioned earlier. The students love this site - I mean they LOVE, LOVE it! Anyhow...we were in the computer lab this past Friday and it was so quiet that I just had to capture the moment because sometimes, let's face it, those moments of silence are rare. Check out these sweet readers, and you can check Raz-Kids by clicking on the link to the right of this blog page under "Sweet Stuff"!