The Foote School

Oral language: Staff encourage children to describe and elaborate on their activities at all the Centers.

Every day the children have a focused discussion about their activities.

The children dictate a personal statement about their day to augment the daily message home.

Children illustrate their daily messages.

Children practice oral language by retelling familiar stories in small groups.

Children learn to articulate reasoning in games such as "Guess My Rule".

Children learn new sounds with many different activities.
See FAQ to learn about forming beginning groups.

After they discuss the sounds, they practice writing letters and generate their own illustrations of words beginning with that sound.
FAQ to learn about forming beginning groups.

Every day the beginning readers review their personal collections of sounds studied and sight words.

Once children know a number of sounds, they learn to distinguish among the short vowel sounds using illustrated letters.

The children blend the sounds together to read words.

Then the children review by playing reading bingo.

The final activity for this group is reading a book with phonetically controlled vocabulary.

A student practices reading a book with phonetically controlled vocabulary.

After the children learn single vowels, they move on to other vowel sounds.

After discussing the vowel combinations, the children locate them on copies of their reading material and share their discoveries.

The most advanced students preview key words and their meanings before they begin reading a chapter.

The children make predictions about the story before they begin to read.

Each child takes a turn reading while the others follow along and the group discusses the story and makes a story map.

Writing.

Children spontaneously experiment with writing throughout the day.

Beginners write random letters in response to a journal question.

As children learn more about letter sounds, they are encouraged to write the sounds that they hear.

Teachers help children hear the sounds but do not spell for the children at the beginning stages.

Teachers help the children hear the sounds as they write in their journals.

Then their writing beomes more phonetically accurate.

Invented spelling is temporary; it will be relaced by 'dictionary' spelling.

An older child wrote a detailed response to the question, 'If you were the fourth pig, what would you use to build your house?'