The groups are based on on-going informal and formal assessments. Students read from leveled books. The purpose of this block is to teach the necessary reading strategies for students to become fluent and independent readers. Once these strategies are in place, students are involved in literature circles where the focus shifts to more comprehension of texts using higher-order thinking questions and skills. The Working with Words block focuses on how words work and the importance of learning the structures of sounds and words.
Students work in whole class and small groups to manipulate sounds and words at their grade level.
Students in kindergarten are developing their phoneme awareness through rhymes, blending and segmenting syllables and sounds while first graders are connecting those soundss with letters and letter chunks. Beginning in second grade, students learn prefixes and suffixes and their meaning. Word origins are discovered and applied. All grades use a word wall for high frequency words and words that are most often misspelled. Writing Guilford County has implemented a county-wide writing plan to ensure students' success in all kinds of writing.