Morning Message Focus Targets
Ideas from Early Literacy Project Inservice
December 2006
Speech – Print Focus
K-1
Print is talk and ideas written down.
  Find that sound
  Brainstorm theme words
  Quotation marks
  Using the word “said” and other words to replace it – verb / tense.
  Find your name
  Finger spaces
  Matching one-to-one
  Dictation
  Letter writing
  Tracking
  Outline day.
Rhyming
K-1
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Word families
Oral story
Riddles
Chants
Songs
Poems
Nursery Rhymes
Nonsense words
Books
Cloze activity
Phoneme manipulation
Finger plays
Story frames
Jingo – Bingo rhyming game
Segmenting / Blending / Manipulation
K-1
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Sounds in words
Words in sentences
Locating, circling sound pictures
Hangman
Locating endings
Find longest word by counting the # of sounds in the words
Clapping beats
Tap the sounds on your arm from wrist up, then slide up to blend.
Word puzzles
Segmented sounds on cards (match to picture to build word).
Body spelling using animated literacy
McCracken
Use counters / poker chips / other manipulatives
2-3
  Rhyming words
  Sticky notes over letters
  Substituting initial, medial & final letters (e.g. leg for log – make it
make sense)
  Silly songs / poems
  Word chains
  Chalk board or white board – changing letters
Sound / Symbol
K-1
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(Grapheme)
Circle sounds / letters
Beginning / middle / end
Syllables
Hangman
Diagraphs
Sounds represented by two or more letters (eight)
S= keep the snake in the cage
Sound search
Animated literacy
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2-3
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Anna Ingam clues
Snowman (hangman)
Sorting words
Shared reading & poetry
Marking vowel clues (Fill in the blank)
Editing (Find all the words that are wrong)
Putting blanks where the vowels go
Best guess strategies
Develop vowel-sound charts
Punctuation
K-1
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Write a message with no periods and decide where they should be
put them in.
Where one sentence starts and one ends (red dots/green dots).
“Fix that sentence”
Tracking
What comes at beginning / end
Capitals
Quotation marks, exclamation mars, question marks
Commas
Read aloud with stops – model it.
Intonation
Capital on your name.
Vocabulary
K-1
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Seasonal / theme / sight words
Word families
Days of the week
Months
Colour words / numbers
Student names
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 Before and after
 Opposites
 Rhyme
 Songs
 Subject integration
 Poems
 “Read My Mind” - Teacher thinks of a word, substitutes lines instead
of sounds, students have to ask question “Is there a ?” Teacher answers
in a sentence – Yes, there is a “?” and writes the sound in the appropriate
place or “No there is no “?” and draws part of a picture. Children race to
see if they can “read your mind” before the picture is completed.
2-3
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Dictionary skills
Word Wall
Vocabulary Tree
Spelling words
Thematic words (science, social, math, etc)
Adjectives
Adverbs
Synonyms, Antonyms, Homonyms
Sight words
Compound words
Contractions
Come up with the answer to a question from a vocabulary list
List/group/label
Riddles and jokes
Word Parts
K-1
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Word endings
Prefix / suffix
Word families
Syllables (clapping sounds).
Contractions / compound words
Orally breaking up compound words / or deleting parts there of.
Locate and circle sound pictures (ur etc)
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Leave endings off words (does it make sense?)
Segmenting sounds
Diagraphs
Cloze sentences
Counting word parts.
Decoding
1-3
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Cloze procedure i.e. fill in the blanks
Play wheel of fortune
Variance in the code – /oa/ /ow/ /o_e/ /o/ /ough/
Making words
Word scrambles
Crossword puzzles
Spelling Patterns
2-3
  Misspelling – check for spelling errors
  Phoneme manipulation
  Tech overlap of vowel sound patterns
  Scratch sheets
  Charts
  Rhyming chant
  Poetry
  Word sorts
Grammar
K-1
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Sentence patterns
Word tense
Error correct / editing an incorrect passage
Prefixes / suffixes
Pronouns
Sight words
Questioning (who, what, when, where, why)
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Verb agreement
Use a word like “runned” (does it make sense?)
Omit word in a sentence
2-3
  Rhyming words
  Cloze poem/story
  Incorporate weekly spelling words
  Leave out all capital letters or punctuation or put the wrong
punctuation and have students correct
  Categorization
  Jumbled sentences
  Sticky dots (place where periods belong)
  Contractions
  Change tense (yesterdays and tomorrow’s message
  Homonyms
  Extending a simple sentence by adding adjectives, adverbs or
additional phrases e.g I have a rabbit. Change to I have a small gray
rabbit with long ears and big feet.
  Semantics, syntactics and pragmatics
Comprehension Strategies
1-3
  Model “read on” and then “reread” strategy
  Read and retell
  Give information and they make up a question using 5W’s
  Use newspaper: Who? Did what? Where? When? Write on
sentence strips and manipulate the parts to make sense.
  Cloze procedure