Building Literacy in First Grade

I spent this morning finishing the mural of first graders' hands & names. I enjoyed seeing their faces light up as they saw it posted on the wall and many of the students quickly found their hand and showed it to friends. This project is a nice way to reinforce basic literacy by helping the kids see their names in print. Most primary desks in the US have student names printed on sentence strips but here they are squished together on benches and don't have the materials for helping make those early literacy connections. In addition, getting agreement on the spelling of names proved to be challenging as school began.












One girl showed me her artwork inspiried by this activity. I loved her idea!






I spent the rest of the morning working on reading with students. If they successfully completed the assigned page, they got a sticker from me.



Below is a video of one girl reading well, followed by her attempts to help a struggling student upon my suggestion. She's a natural teacher and seemed to enjoy the chance to help her peer. (She was also getting into my things so I needed to give her a job to keep her busy :-). As I was trying to capture the precious moment on video, other students were eager to be included - you can see random hands and fingers working their way into the frame. My own finger shows up as students were crowding around me trying to get a glimpse of the action. Hold still, yeah right! :-).

This camera is a kid magnet - they especially love the opportunity to see it immediately.

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