Mrs. Barnes' First Grade Jungle
Room 213
Our Curriculum
In all of Wake County, and definitely here at Creech Road, we use a variety of educational materials, methods, and frameworks to best educate our students. Below you will find information about the various parts of our curriculum, including Letterland, Daily 5 and CAFE, Writer's Workshop, and the Common Core and Essential Standards.
LetterLand
LetterLand is an interactive and engaging program that teaches basic phonics skills as connected to a variety of characters who reside in LetterLand. Each character corresponds with a specific phonetic sound and is introduced with his or her own backstory. These stories help students connect with the phonics concept in a more concrete way than just memorizing rules.
Daily 5 and CAFE
The Daily 5 is a framework for structuring our literacy block so that our students learn to develop lifelong habits of reading, writing, and working independently.
Each day during the literacy block, students will rotate between authentic reading and writing centers including Sead to Self, Read to Someone, Listen to Reading, Work on Writing, Word Work, and Guided Reading.
The CAFE Menu is a set of specific literacy strategies, broken down into four components--comprehension, accuracy, fluency, and expanding vocabulary. We use this system to teach, assess, and monitor our students' progress in their literacy development.
Writer's Workshop
The writer's workshop is another framework of teaching we use in our classroom. This framework allows students to spend time practicing their writing skills on a daily basis. A simple 10-minute minilesson starts out the workshop time to give simple, focused instruction on a specific writing skill, then the teacher backs out and allows students to write. During the writing time, the teacher can conference with individual students or small groups to provide personalized interventions and feedback as needed.
Click on this link to learn even more:
Common Core and Essential Standards
The Common Core is a set of academic standards in literacy and mathematics that outline a what students should know and be able to do by the end of their respective grade levels. The purpose behind the creation of the Common Core was to ensure that all students graduate from high school. Currently, forty-three states, the District of Columbia, and the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) have voluntarily adopted the Common Core.
In addition to the Common Core, North Carolina has create the Essential Standards which provide guidelines for student learning in Socical Studies, Science, Music, Art, PE, etc.