Working in Small Groups - and Our First Mystery Reader

The last two weeks, I have been trying hard to get into our small groups groove!  We are on week 3 of centers - just started our 3rd round of  centers. They are getting better about making sure of getting where they need to go without me telling them. They are learning to rely on the screen and become independent. (You can read {THIS} post to see how we do small groups and centers in reading). That's BIG in my room - being independent.  They will get there. Some have already come so far!  So anyway, this week in small groups, we are reading in our books (I use Reading A-Z books for my guided reading), focusing on reading strategies - how to decode words.

This week it is Lips the Fish and Eagle Eye!

If you need some reading strategy posters, Nicole from Teaching with Style has some cute free ones! Check them out {HERE}.

Here are the links for the rest of the Beanie Babies for the posters

After practicing reading the book together and reviewing some reading strategies, I handed them the whisper phone for them to read their book a few times.

I posted about how to make your whisper phones in {THIS} post.

These are some of my favorite tools for my guided reading groups.

If you want to see more of my favorite guided reading tools, check out {THIS} post.

We've also been working on Handwriting. I forget how much we need to work on handwriting with some students in the beginning of first grade. ah!

Floating letters, big letters, tiny letters, backwards letters, non-connected letters, squished letters, capital letters everywhere - ah! So, we've been using my {handwriting pack}.

And we've been using some of my {number practice pack} too!

    

AND we had one of our mystery readers come in to read a book to us.

After I read {Jodi's post} on her The Book with No Pictures, I knew it had to be that book!

So we wrote a letter to her and asked her to come read the book. 

The kids absolutely love this book. In fact, in our journals that we just wrote on the topic, "What is your favorite book?" and about half the class wrote that this book was!