Growing Readers Together

November Tips for First Grade Parents

Reading Strategies

When your child reaches an unknown word, it is important to let her use reading strategies to try to read the word. Here are two reading strategies that you may want to encourage your student to use.

Encourage your child to look for a chunk in the word that they know. (Ex: sh, ee, ar)
Encourage your child to stretch the word out slowly and put the sounds together to figure out the word.

Working with Words!

This month we have been practicing working with words that have short vowel patterns.

Here are some fun ideas to help your child read words with short vowel patterns:

Play Bingo: You can draw blank bingo boards and fill in the boxes with consonant-vowel-consonant (short vowel) words. For example, van, pot, mop, get, leg, bed, jug, mud, kid, dip, bet, hot, kid, mat, pan, cut, bad, etc. You can make calling cards to match the words on the bingo boards. Your child chooses a calling card, reads it out loud, and then uses pennies, Cheerios, etc. to mark the word on the board. Continue playing until everyone has made a bingo!

Word Families: You can give your child a specific word family pattern (-at, -an, -ad, -am, -et, -eg, -ed, -it, -in, -ip, -ot, -og, -op, -ut, -ud, -ug). They can try to come up with as many words as they can think of that have this pattern. You can use dry erase boards, sidewalk chalk, fancy markers and paper, or whatever else you can think of to create lists of words.

Digraphs sh, wh, th, and wh

We have also been learning about the digraphs sh, ch, th, and wh. A digraph is two letters together that make one sound!

Here is a fun way to practice reading words with the digraphs sh, ch, th and wh:

Write sh, ch, th, and wh words on index cards. Have your child read the words and sort them into piles (sh, ch, th, and wh words). Below is a list of possible words to use:

sh: ship, shop, shut, shell, shot, shed, fish, dish, wish, rash
ch: chip, chop, chat, chum, chin, much, much, such, rich, inch
th: then, them, that, this, thin, thud, math, path, with, bath
wh: what, when, whip, whiz, whim, whop, whit, which

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Deleting Ending Sounds

In first grade, students need to master the ability to identify and manipulate sounds. They need to be able to delete the last sound in a word. Here is a suggestion of how to help your child practice this skill: Say a word and ask your child to repeat the word. Then ask your child to say the word without the last sound. (Make the sound, don't say the letter name.)

Say date without the /t/ sound. (day)
Say bean without the /n/ sound. (be)
Say sunny without the /e/ sound. (sun)
Say bike without the /k/ sound. (by)
Say meat without the /t/ sound. (me)
Say road without the /d/ sound. (row)
Say light without the /t/ sound. (lie)
Say sheep without the /p/ sound. (she)
Say make without the /k/ sound. (may)
Say heat without the /t/ sound. (he)
Say lane without the /n/ sound. (lay)
Say rain without the /n/ sound. (ray)
Say paid without the /d/ sound. (pay)
Say white without the /t/ sound. (why)
Say leaf without the /f/ sound. (Lee)