* I will always teach below the class minimum number of students for the first few weeks of a semester! If the class continues for a few weeks with no more enrollments and I feel the need to cancel or move the class time, I will give at least one or two weeks' notice. :) I always enjoy getting to know my students and truly love teaching, whether it's to one learner or a full class!

In this ongoing class, we will practice beginning reading and writing skills in order to read and write a complete sentence (or more!) together. Here's the twist: the sentences we create will have a silly mix of subjects, verbs, and adjectives (making our sentences, well, silly)!  

At the beginning of each class, we will learn about nouns, verbs, and adjectives.  We'll practice what these words mean through song and dance (for whoever wants to join me in singing and showing off their dance moves)!  We will learn and practice sentence structure (starts with a capital, ends with punctuation, spaces between words), learn a "tricky sound," discuss reading/writing/spelling strategies as they arise in our sentences, and work to both read and write a complete sentence together. This class is very much student-led as we create our silly stories and sentences together, which gives me the opportunity to be flexible as a teacher and teach/review different sight words and strategies as we encounter them.  Join me as we work on our beginning reading and writing skills, create sentences together, and, just maybe, get a little silly (or a lot)!

***When writing, I will guide students through sounding out each word and spelling phonetically [writing the letter(s) for each sound heard in the word]. I will teach spelling patterns and strategies as I see fit, but not all words may be spelled correctly in this class as we write together. We are aiming for creating independent writers, so while I may teach the correct spelling of a word, I will first guide your student through sounding the word out on their own. That way, when your learner wants to write a word independently and does not know that word’s spelling, they can use phonetic spelling [identifying each sound in a word and applying the correct letter(s) that match that sound] to write it. As long as it includes every sound, and we can read it, they will have successfully written independently.  We are encouraging confident and independent writers! (An example of this would be if your learner wrote "casl" for "castle" or "bunee" for "bunny.")

*Students in this class should know all letters and sounds and be able to write each letter independently. (However, I am always happy to help briefly review handwriting of a letter while we write if a student asks!) Prior knowledge of/exposure to sight words is recommended, but not required, for this class (I will briefly review/reteach as we encounter each one).  

We will be learning/practicing the following "tricky sounds" in our silly sentences:

September 18th: silent e
September 25th: double consonants
October 2nd: ing
October 9th: ink
October 16th: oa
October 23rd: ai
October 30th: soft c
November 6th: ow
November 13th: oo
November 20th: NO CLASS-HAPPY THANKSGIVING! :)
November 27th: soft c
December 4th: words with am/an

Join me for reading and writing practice and, most of all, lots of laughs!