Reading Comprehension and Diagraphs

For reading comprehension I chose one of the books we got from Tiger Tales.

Truck Party by Tammi Salzano illustrated by Hannah Wood, is an easy read, and a cute story about how all the trucks come together to create a birthday party for little truck. Each truck has their own gift, or area they contribute in, such as decorations, lights, cake, ice cream, right down to clean up. I liked the book because it is a great conversation started concerning how we all have different talents, as well as how important it is for everyone to work together. Selena really loves the story and is often found incorporating the story with her stuffed animals, replacing the trucks with various animals.

We used the book in story time in hopes to stretch comprehension. I read the story then asked Selena a series of questions, which for the most part she got correct. There were a couple we had to revisit in the story, but I think mainly because she was unfamiliar with what some of the trucks were called. I had hoped to have Selena do some illustrating but that didn’t happen only because Selena is not much for planned art these days. Later though she did pull her stuffed animals out and retold the story with her stuffed animals.

We were given some great phonics cards from some friends of ours. I have never really used them before and thought it would be fun to see how Selena took to them today. The section I decided to work on was diagraphs. Selena knows this as letter blends of vowels, so the new name really drew her attention. This is what the cards look like:

Selena had little trouble going through these cards and telling me what sounds the different letter blends made, we then flipped the card over to have her read the word on the other side to see if she was correct. I don’t know how much we will use these cards, but it was a great little review to tell me where we need to work from. Since Selena found it to be a fun game, I will leave them out with her self work items and see how many times I catch her just going through them on her own, or combining them with her magnetic letters to make her own extensions.