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The Adventure
First-graders explore a hometown by following four adventurous HomeTown Trackers, role-playing the daily activities of town leaders, and building a model hometown square. A variety of fiction and nonfiction books, as well as other instructional materials, are included to help teachers target essential first-grade reading skills. HomeTown features lessons that explicitly teach phonological awareness, the alphabetic principle, vocabulary development, comprehension, listening, speaking, spelling, and writing.
Welcome to HomeTown
As the adventure unfolds, students discover the inner workings of a community. They create personal profiles, relating shared reading experiences to real life. Students use letter squares to demonstrate their understanding of sounds and syllables in words. Concepts of print and phonological awareness are developed daily in teacher-directed challenge lessons.
HomeTown Leaders
In week 2, students respond to reading through the expressive arts. They role-play community leaders and create neighborhood-helper puppets. Students make inferences and draw conclusions as they play word games focusing on important community systems. Opportunities to decode words and develop oral language occur daily.
Big Business
Throughout the HomeTown adventure, students read decodable words in sentences and stories. They participate in daily small-group lessons focusing on fluency, phonological awareness, instructional reading, and the alphabetic principle. In addition, students use their knowledge of graphic sources to read, then create simple neighborhood maps.
Celebrate HomeTown!
In week 4, first-graders connect themes and ideas across texts. Shared writing is enhanced as students develop plans for a neighborhood parade. As a culminating activity, they construct a 3-D model of their hometown.
Skills and Strategies
- Fluency
- Phonological awareness
- Alphabetic principle
- Vocabulary development and concept awareness
- Comprehension and literary response
- Writing
- Listening and speaking
Benefits
- Improves reading performance
- Aligns with state and national standards
- Develops reading comprehension strategies and essential word-attack skills
- Strengthens phonological awareness and letter-sound correspondences
- Includes relevant, high-interest content and concepts
- Provides ongoing student assessment
- Allows teachers to focus on the quality of instruction with explicit daily lesson plans
- Engages and motivates teachers and students
Each Classroom Receives
- Comprehensive Curriculum Guide with daily lesson plans
- Content-related instructional materials
- Built-in assessment tools
- Suggestions for parent and community involvement
- Voyager Adventure Books
Parent Connection
- Parent Guides (English or Spanish)
Model
- Single grade-level program for grade 1
- Up to 4 hours of learning adventures per day for 4 weeks, Total of 80 hours
CURRICULUM SUPPORT
- Available through the Customer Support Hotline at 1-888-399-1995 between 7:00 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. (CST).
CONTACT US
- To find out more about this and other exciting curricula, please Contact Us.
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