HomeTown - Grade 1

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).