EPIC Teacher's Guide - Book - Page 15
ABC Notebook
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Say: Open your ABC Notebooks.
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Ask: What letter is this? (Elicit: the letter P)
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What sound does the letter P make? (Elicit: /P/)
Say together with the pupils: The letter is P and the sound is /p/.
Say: Find the letter Pp sticker on sticker page 3. Put the sticker on the letter
Pp on page 201 in the ABC Notebook.
Trace and write the big and small letters Pp to complete the page.
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Give pupils some time to complete the page independently.
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Say: Find the sticker pictures that begin with the sound /p/ on sticker page 3
and stick them in the ABC Notebook.
NOTE
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Notice any pupils who struggle with fine motor skills.
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Weaker pupils should be encouraged to circle the target letter with a colored
crayon – if it is in the beginning circle it in green, in the middle in yellow, or at
the end in red.
d. Sight Words
Sight words are words that we frequently encounter that should be recognized
globally rather than decoded letter by letter. For these particular words, “sight of
the word activates its pronunciation and meaning immediately in memory and
allows readers to focus their attention on comprehension rather than word
recognition.” (Ehri 2014: 5). It is important for pupils to recognize sight words
quickly to ensure fluency in reading. When combined with strong graphemephoneme knowledge, phonemic awareness, and decoding skills, acquiring these
sight words allows pupils to employ multiple essential reading strategies for reading
both familiar and novel words in English.
In Epic, pupils encounter the written form sight words after being exposed to the
words and their meaning orally. The pupils have many opportunities to practice
recognizing these words in isolation, within a sentence, and finally in a short text or
story. The sight word icon in the Course Book (see icon above) indicates to both the
teacher and pupil that the activity practices sight words. Pupils should “take a
mental picture” of the word in order to learn to recognize it when they encounter it
in the future.
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