First grade students are consistently encouraged to apply phonetic knowledge and decoding strategies when reading.  While numerous phonetic patterns and rules are reinforced individually, as a class, we have primarily emphasized those relating to our weekly word work and spelling focus (short vowels, blends, digraphs).  In addition to learning phonetic rules, students are working on good reading habits and basic decoding strategies.  These strategies involve using pictures to help read unknown words, getting one’s mouth ready to read a word, stretching out the sounds of a word and then putting the sounds together, chunking words by looking for known parts, skipping a word by reading the rest of the sentence and then rereading, trying the short or long vowel sound, trying again by rereading the sentence, and asking for help.  We will be using the following animal helpers to remember each of these reading strategies for unknown words.