Mrs. Kathy Rathbun
1st Grade: Reading/Language Arts & Religion
kathyr@cccparish.org

I am forever grateful for the blessings I continuously receive by being a part of the Corpus Christi community and a teacher for your precious child. God bless!
 Hello and Welcome!​
First Grade is THE place to be! Our days are packed full with reading, writing, spelling, listening to read-alouds, exporing our text books, learning about our Catholic faith, practicing being kind Christian children, and having fun!
Language Arts ​
Throughout the year we work through our Journeys reading program. We were blessed with new, revised editions of all our Journeys materials last year due to the amazing generosity of our Donum Fidei Auction.  In addition to that we have small group reading instruction for all students. I incorporate the Daily 5 components (Read to Self, Read to Someone, Listen to Reading, Word Work, Work on Writing), plus I am adding Computer as one of the options. I have used Daily 5 for years and appreciate the structure it provides for students to enhance their language arts skills while I work with small reading groups.


Reading
As your 1st grader develops as a reader there are some helpful things that can be practiced at home: 

• encourage using strategies beyond sounding out - pictures; stretch out all the sounds & put together; skip the word, read the rest of the sentence and then go back; try a word that makes sense; try a different vowel sound, they read a page, you read a page
• 5-word rule: if they are unable to read more than 5 words on a page the text is too difficult for them to read alone
• for harder texts, have them find words they do know on the page before you read it
• comprehension (understanding what was read) is as important as word-calling; always ask your student to tell you about what they just read (by book, by chapter, by page, whatever works best): if unable to retell what was just read, have them read it again, slower if necessary, and concentrate on comprehension

Always remember that learning to read is developmental, just like learning to walk and talk. It does not happen at the same time or same age for everyone. We are all getting better all the time!


Writing
We begin writing on day one of 1st Grade, and by the end of the year our stories will be amazing! However, you may not always be able to read what we are writing, but we will get better and better. Since we aren't born knowing how to spell, and spelling in the English language is not easy, much of our writing will begin as 'temporary spelling'.  As children are writing a word they don't know how to spell they listen for the sounds they hear and write the letters that make those sounds. This temporary spelling is not always easy for us adults to read (unless you've had years of experience like I have), but it is much more effective than each student waiting for an adult to spell the word they want to write. And they really do learn how to spell those words they are writing!

Religion
Our Religion program is We Believe from Sadlier Publishers. The year-long program is based on the Six Tasks of Catechesis, through which the students will 1. LEARN about their faith 2. CELEBRATE the Mass and sacraments
3. CHOOSE to show love and respect 4. PRAY every day 5. SHARE faith with others 6. LIVE out their faith. This will actually be my first year to teach Religion in First Grade and I am very excited about sharing this very important part of my life with the students as we learn about these six tasks together. 




UPCOMING ACTIVITIES:
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Classroom Party Sign UpParents, click the link below to sign up for various classroom parties throughout the year! 

Sign Up Genius - Rathbun

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