A typical Early Years Day in Grade 1

by Kelly Hardy
(Melbourne, Australia)

Arrive at school at 8.00am - Set classroom up for literacy block, have breakfast, catch up on some gossip in the staffroom.

8.45 - Bell goes children enter the classroom. Change take home readers, practice spelling words, do silent reading of familiar texts.

9.00 - Mark roll, send messages and lunch orders to office and canteen. Quick hello and chat.
Read focus big book or other text to children talk about focus, model reading strategy etc.

9.15 - Children off to tables to work on needs based independent activities. One group stays with me and we do guided reading together with a reading focus. Do picture walk and book introduction, talk about information that they can bring to the text and prior knowledge. Children read independently and I come around and listen to them read using the focus to guide with teaching points. Children come back together to discuss books and I ask some questions about comprehension and inference. These children then set to work on an activity to further there vocab or understanding of the text.

9.30 - All groups change activity. Some may just move onto a different one with the same resource or the activity may change completely. Bring another guided reading group to the floor with a focus that is needs based for this group. Follow up activity for this group would be tomorrow.

9. 45 - Bring all children together on the floor to share what they had done that day in there groups or have one of the guided reading groups talk about or read their book to class.

9.50 - Modelled, shared or interactive writing.

10.00 - Children go to independent writing activities, letter or card writing, handwriting, spelling, personal writing (diary), book response, storywriting etc. I work with a group on the floor on our week focus (this week was writing a draft about a story we had already done a plan for).

10.40 - Children share what they have done.
10.45 - Recess

11.15 - Numeracy - I follow Nelson Maths guidelines and planning and throw some of my own stuff in for good measure. I start with a focus this can sometimes tend to be hands on with concrete materials. This goes for 10 minutes, it is the main teaching part of the session. The children the break off into 2 groups. The first is an independent group who are consolidating what they know about the topic taught. The other group is a teaching group and I work with these children to help them understand the topic or concept taught. Once I see them understanding, not all the time, I send them off to work on the independent task.

12.10 - We write in our Maths journal and talk about what we have learned today.

12.15 - Lunch

1.15 - Integrated Studies or Specialist subjects - This term we are learning about The Farm so last week we chose to learn about pigs and the resources we as consumers get from them. We did a learning and gathering facts session, a craft session and made a poster about pigs.

3.00 - Show and Tell (I hate Show and Tell) so I mix it up a little and do lots of different things to make this more interesting.

3.15 - Dismissal
3.15-4.30 -Meetings, correction, preparation for next day, tidying up etc etc.