Syntax: This area of the document shows how students are expected to progress from using simple sentences in Kindergarten (e.g., "She wears boots") to much more complex sentences in Grade 4 (e.g., She wears her red boots and blue jacket when it rains even though she’d rather stay inside and read her book"). 

One suggestion to help your students get to the next level syntactically: Dialogic Conversation to Support Oral Language Development! You can read all about it here. 

Oral Storytelling: A great way to build this skill in our students is through story workshop! 

One of the challenges teachers commonly experience is sourcing materials for story workshop. Here are a few ideas:

• Have students collect items from nature, e.g., pinecones, sticks, leaves.

• Have students' families send in "beautiful stuff" they find around the house - beads, pipe cleaners, pretty paper scraps, etc. 

• See if your district offers loose parts resource kits you can borrow.

• Think outside the box! Story workshop doesn't have to require endless materials. Here are a few lessons you can try without needing dozens of jars of dollar store gems etc.:

  • Have students make shape collages and tell a story based on their collage - a good cross-curriculur connection to math!

  • Give each student a small pot of play dough to create their story with.

  • Have students create fairy houses (I love these templates!) and tell stories about the fairies/elves who live inside! 

Phonics

Your approach to teaching phonics will vary based on the grade level that you teach. If you teach Kinder, I'd recommend this schedule for the year:

• term 1: teach letter sounds

• January and February: teach CVC words. This is a resource I like! 

• the first two weeks of March: assess and group your students. You'll probably make about four groups. The groups do not all have to be the same size! For example, in a class of 20, you could have a group of 6, a group of 3, a group of 7, and a group of 4 - and that's okay! Your groups might look something like this:

  • group 1: still learning their letter sounds

  • group 2: knows their letter sounds; can kind of read CVC words, but not consistently or easily

  • group 3: pretty good at reading CVC words; still needs some practice

  • group 4:  can read CVC words easily; ready to move on to digraphs (sh, th, ch, ck, wh)

• term 3: Work with your differentiated small groups. Keep it manageable and realistic - e.g., you see each group once a week for 15-20 minutes. Meanwhile, the other students are doing literacy centre activities that have been introduced earlier in the year, and that they are therefore independent with.

If you teach an older grade level, you will likely need to have differentiated groups from the beginning - I try to start mine around mid-October, once I've had an opportunity to assess where each student is and I've been able to teach the expectations for independent literacy activities so that I'll be able to work with my groups uninterrupted.  Create your groups by identifying where each student is in the scope and sequence you are using and grouping similar students together. For example, this past year, the groups in my Grades 2/3 class looked like this:

Group 1 - six students - absolute beginners who didn't know their letter sounds

Group 2 - three students - beginning readers who knew their letters and could read some CVC words, but not easily or consistently

Group 3 - six students - had mastered CVC words and some more complex phonics patterns, e.g., magic e, blends, digraphs. Still needed to work on some advanced phonics skills, e.g., r-controlled vowels. Eventually, this group "graduated" from decodables and moved on to less controlled text.

Group 4 - seven students - easily able to read texts including all primary-level phonics patterns. This group read grade-level non-decodables from Reading A-Z with a focus on comprehension. 

My number one piece of advice is to put a structure in place that will allow you to work with your differentiated small groups, whether it's Daily 5 (this is my personal preference for Grade 1 and up), literacy centres, or even just a silent reading block during which students know they are expected to actually silently read! (No wandering, chatting, etc.) Teaching the expectations for this block of time is really important to focus on in September. 

Morphology: I'll be honest - I haven't always spent tons of time on morphology! Something to look at going forward!

One thing I would suggest is building in morphology lessons during your modelled writing. Examples:

Kindergarten: "I'm sounding out the word 'cats'. C-a-t-s. I added the 's' to show that there's more than one cat."

Grade 2: "I threw my dog's ball. See this little mark that I wrote in the word 'dog's'? That's called an apostrophe. It shows that the ball belongs to my dog."

You can also find opportunities to teach morphology during read-alouds. For example, while reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to your Grade 4 class, you could say, "'Why, I've sometimes believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.' Does anyone know what the word 'impossible' means? That's right, it means not possible. The prefix 'im' means 'not'."

Spelling

A lot of your spelling instruction can take place during your phonics lessons. Additionally, you'll need to teach students to spell irregular high-frequency words. This is my favourite resource - from The Measured Mom again!

Comprehension

The best resource I can recommend here is Adrienne Gear! 

Some advice I'll give for this area of reading instruction is to steer clear of over-relying on simple comprehension questions ("What did Tim bring to the park?") based on boring passages. Your comprehension lessons are an opportunity to help your students make meaningful connections, visualize, and ask deep-thinking questions. It's crucial to understand that you DON'T need to focus your comprehension instruction solely on texts written at your students' independent or even instructional reading level. Most comprehension instruction I do in Primary is based on books I've read aloud to the class - there are so many beautiful, meaningful, engaging picture books out there that will connect to many areas of your curriculum.

Composition

"Composition" includes every aspect of writing other than printing: telling a story by drawing pictures in K; writing paragraphs in Grade 4;  and everything in between.

I could write a whole other blog post on this! Here are two of the most important things I want to mention. 

• MODEL, MODEL, MODEL! Modelled and shared writing is SO valuable. It's okay to model writing that is way above what your students can do independently. If you want your Grade 2 class to write about haunted houses using five senses imagery, don't just model writing "I see a spider." Model writing "A spider crawls up the wall, its hairy legs twitching, its eight huge eyes glaring at me hungrily." Students won't write that level of sentence, but they'll aim for it. In modelling this way, you're giving them permission to take risks and let their imaginations run wild! 

• Quality AND quantity of practice are important. Please don't have your students write journal entries on random topics every single day; they (and you!) will get so bored. BUT you also can't just teach writing a few times a month and expect that that will suffice. I'd recommend that you aim for two to three THOUGHTFUL, INTENTIONALLY PLANNED writing lessons each week.  (This is in addition to other writing opportunities that will occur throughout your day during Math, Science, Social Studies, etc.) This could look like:

  • day 1: planning

  • day 2: writing in notebooks and conferencing

  • day 3: producing a good copy - I like to have students rewrite their piece in fineliner on "good copy paper" (just lined paper I found for free on TPT) and draw a picture. When I taught Grade 2 a few years back, I tried to have students do this every week, but it was just too much time spent copying out, and some students took so long to finish that it held the class up from moving on to the next project. Now, I like to have students do a good copy once or twice a month so they have a piece they can really be proud of and that we can display on the bulletin board, or show their parents at student-centred conferences, or glue in their portfolios, etc.