Writing Goals

This year, our first graders will have monthly writing goals. These goals are directly connected to their individual writing needs as well as the genre that we are working on for that particular month. We pick these goals from the Lucy Calkins rubrics as well as from the Common Core State Standards. For this month, our writers have goals that they are working on while writing about the Small Moments in their lives!

Here are a few examples of first grade literacy goals:

First-graders can:

• Read and retell familiar stories
• Use strategies (rereading, predicting, questioning, contextualizing) when comprehension breaks down
• Use reading and writing for various purposes on their own initiative
• Orally read with reasonable fluency to tell a story
• Use letter-sound associations, word parts, and context to identify new words
• Identify an increasing number of words by sight
• Sound out and represent all substantial sounds in spelling a word
• Write about topics that are personally meaningful
• Attempt to use some punctuation and capitalization

What teachers do:

• Support the development of vocabulary by reading daily to the children, transcribing their language, and selecting materials that expand children's knowledge and language development
• Model strategies and provide practice for identifying unknown words
• Give children opportunities for independent reading and writing practice
• Read, write, and discuss a range of different text types (poems, informational books)
• Introduce new words and teach strategies for learning to spell new words
• Demonstrate and model strategies to use when comprehension breaks down
• Help children build lists of commonly used words from their writing and reading

What parents and family members can do:

• Talk about favorite storybooks
• Read to children and encourage them to read to you
• Suggest that children write to friends and relatives
• Bring to a parent-teacher conference evidence of what your child can do in writing and reading
• Encourage children to share what they have learned about their writing and reading