Literacy Calendar

I started this year off wanting to do a literacy calendar area, since I do not teach math, I thought it would be a great way to frame my daily literacy instruction. However, this is my first year in first grade, I didn't have a great frame of what firsties would need as a daily focus. Flash forward 12 weeks &  I was able to clearly see where the broken links were in my firstie's reading skills. Blends & vowel combinations! We also need a lot more focus on fluent reading! I started looking through blogs & Pintrest to see what was out there, I am SURE most teachers do something similar to this, but I just could not find anything on a daily literacy routine or calendar set up. So this is what I came up with! I think it is sort of a reading focus wall but also very interactive for the students to lead and learn while we go through each item!  

The first thing I have are my focus wall labels to identify each piece of learning. You can find them in my TPT shop! 

Sight Words:

We have our weekly sight words on the red chart that come from our reading series & go along with our story of the week, on Friday's we make a big todo about moving them over to the word wall & into long term memory! I just type them into text boxes & print! 

Sentence Stems:

The yellow chart displays sentence stems, we usually focus on the same ones for about two weeks, we read these aloud for fluency. The reason I teach sentence stems is help my students answer questions, orally and written, in full sentences. I have found the stems help them frame basic thoughts into a sentence! My partner teacher even noticed the full sentence switch over, WITHOUT me mentioning it! YAY! 

Genre: 

I have this genre poster displayed along with the genre poster for the genre our story of the week is focusing on! We review the characteristics of the week's genre and  make connections to other books we have recently read that are also in the same genre! 

Vowels: 

I have these super cute vowel posters up on my wall, the kids the pictures and chanting the sounds and pictures! The best part is that they are a FREEBIE from Christine Statzel! Click on her name to check out her awesome TPT store! :) 

Blends: 

I recently went on a search to update my blends posters and came across another great FREEBIE from Kristen at Ladybug's Teacher Files!  Stop by her blog to pick up these great posters! I love that the word examples are not the first thing that come to mind! Hello people..EXPANDING that vocabulary! 

Strategy & Skills: 

I have weekly strategy & skills mini-posters that I change out to coordinate with our weekly focus! These are in the works for TPT still! :) I feel a freebie coming on.. 

Story Map: 

I use this big green and black laminated poster to write down the map of the story that we are focusing on this week with visa v markers! The kids are dying to do this, but are starting it next week. Baby steps! 

Anchor Charts: 

I have two clothes pins with tacks hot glued to the back to hold up up new anchor charts that we are using/making for the current week! This way I can have two half charts or one large chart displayed each week. Also, since I do not have a white board in this area, I would like to note that since I teach two blocks of reading to the same level of students, I generally make my anchor chart frames and then laminate them, so I can do the same lesson while filling in/writing on the anchor chart with both groups! So if you were wondering where I am writing while teaching whole group, its on my laminated anchor charts! 

Letter Combinations:

We chant this chart each day! The kids love it and it is already helping them with unfamiliar words in their reading! The anchor chart idea came from Maria Mallon, you can see her original chart below, I changed very little on the copy I made!  ,  I have been letting my teacher's assistant, which rotates each week use a pointer to point at all of the words & charts as we read them, I just sit in my chair and observe! After all of this is done, we do HFW flash cards, about 50words/per day.
Weekly Fluency Poem:

Then we practice our fluency reading a poem each week, that either coordinates with the phonics focus skill, holiday, or social studies theme for the week! 
The whole routine takes about 18 minutes and a bit longer on Mondays!  I should also mention that I do not have a space for spelling words because I use Words Their Way as my spelling program and it is differentiated into 6 different tests/per week between my two reading blocks, two much to keep up with on display! One week in, we are all loving this new routine! I am loving the results I am already seeing with my kiddos! I am open to questions or comments with improvements or additions to the wall! 
-Katie