Every Day Counts

Every Day Counts is a daily calendar activity for all students in First Grade that integrates language, math, and writing. We use money values, time, days of the week, and place values according to which day of the week, month, and year it is. We take this process one step further to include how many days we have been in First Grade.

A daily record complete with its own piggy bank enables the students to write out this information. In addition, as a class we share a daily routine of going over each section of the Everyday Counts process. Chants, songs, and rhymes make this exercise a fun activity for everyone.

Journal Writing and Writer’s Workshop

Focus: To instill in children a love for writing and produce life-long writers.

To help children become comfortable writing fictional narratives and memoirs, students write in a journal each day. Teachers provide strategies for independent writing through modeling and mini-lessons. Students are encouraged to explore their writings to include collecting facts and publishing their own pieces of both fiction and non-fiction. Celebration of this published independent writing is called our “Authors Chair”. Students share their work and gain further validation that writing is an effective way to communicate.

Spelling

Focus: To encourage the use of transitional spelling and promote the skills needed to move children toward conventional spelling.

So different from the old spelling tests of years gone by, spelling in First Grade has been jazzed up to include kinetic movement (Cast-A-Spell) word walls and phonics play. Each of these activities involves students moving letters around to spell words:

• Experimenting with sounds using a dry erase board.
• Matching words to the word wall.

Children enjoy making and breaking words into parts, sounds, and word chunks. Through songs, movement, and visual games, first graders lose their inhibitions to take risks when spelling new words.