Related Articles
Fall Fluster

Bitsy Parks is stressed from trying to “cover” all the lessons in the first required reading unit of the year with her first graders. She takes a deep breath and decides to integrate more of her own lessons into her instruction.

Read Alouds to Start the Year in First Grade

Bitsy Parks selects read alouds for the first weeks of school for many different purposes, from building community to helping her first graders navigate the classroom library.

Levels and What’s Appropriate

“How do you know what level they have selected?” a visitor asks Bitsy Parks as she observes during a first-grade independent reading period. “I don’t,” Bitsy responds, and explains why it is a beautiful thing.

Related Videos
First-Grade Reading Share: Connections

Bitsy Parks helps her first-grade students complete “thumb reflections” on making connections in reading early in the year by modeling connections from three conferences in a whole-class share session.

Connecting to Text: First-Grade Conference

Bitsy Parks confers with first grader Leo early in the school year, reinforcing the basic principle of making connections to text while reading.

First-Grade Conferring: A Two-Word Picture Book

Bitsy Parks shows how even the simplest picture book can lead to powerful conferring. In this example, a first-grade English language learner is reading a picture book that uses only two words in the text.

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