Week of October 17

Another fun week has gone by! We finished the week off on Friday with America Reads day. A huge thank you to anyone who came in and volunteered to read to a classroom! Our students truly love it, and so do our teachers. What's better than a day full of reading, anyway!?

Our student leadership council students greeted for the first 20 minutes of America Reads Day!

This week our kindergarteners continued in our Global Read Aloud author/illustrator study of Lauren Castillo. This week, the book we read was called The Reader. It is written by Amy Hest, but illustrated by Lauren Castillo. Mrs. Hoeger & Miss Blake's classes got to Skype with other classes and read the book together. Mrs. Younger's class wrote an email back to our partner classroom in Canada. And because of field trips, Mrs. Hilgenkamp's class will catch up next week. I truly love this project, and I was lucky enough last week to get to meet Pernille Ripp, the creator of this project.

Mrs. Hoeger's class Skyped with a class from South Carolina.

Miss Blake's class Skyped with a class from Ohio!

Myself & Pernille Ripp, creator of GRA. Thankful ITEC brought her in!

First graders started practicing the strategy of visualization this week. I used a poem called "My Neighbor's Dog is Purple" by Jack Prelutsky and had students visualize before reading, during reading, and after reading. 

Second graders watched book trailers for some chapter books that appeal to their age and reading levels. I have a YouTube playlist that I've started that I just keep adding to. It's such an easy way to promote a bunch of books quickly.

           

Third grade students wrapped up the inferencing activity that we started last week. They had read a wordless picture book and recorded their inferences made using the illustrations. This week, students found a page from their book and shared it with the class, asking the class to make an inference about their page. They also got to talk through my microphone if they wanted to, which was a super big deal to them! Whatever it takes!

Fourth graders finished up their Bloxels picture book retells. As with the first time kids (and their teacher) do something, some turn out well and some get lost, and who knows what else. We do have a few games shared to the Bloxels site, but it is hard to share them from there. If you go here and then warp to 418, 86 on the grid, then you'll see Ayumi & Ella's, and if you warp to 419, 86 you'll see another example. 

Next week we have a short week, so we'll be doing some Makerspace activities and then the week of Halloween we'll jump back in to lessons! 

Three Weeks of Catching Up!

Typically, I devote my Saturday mornings to coffee drinking, Food Networking watching, and blogging about our week at school. The last couple of weekends have been so busy that my routine had to be set aside for things like weddings and antique shopping with family. And as much as I'd like to think I have time at school to write, that only exists in my dreams.

So, here I sit, ready to write about the last three weeks. Well, two weeks mostly, as I was gone three days this past week, so there's not a lot to tell. I'll do my best to recap the happenings of those three weeks.

Kindergarten students read three more wordless books, then began an author/illustrator study of Lauren Castillo as part of the Global Read Aloud. I am hoping that each of our kindergarten classes will be able to Skype with another class from around the country in the next two weeks.          
         
                                                                                        

First graders have been learning about poems in class, so we've been reading some poems during library class. The first time, we talked about how poems often use words that appeal to the five senses. We read a poem about popcorn, then wrote our own. Of course, we enjoyed a popcorn snack after looking, smelling, touching, tasting, and hearing it. 

We've also been reading some poems from some popular poetry books! 

 

And here's a quick poetry rap we did reading a sight word poem about sweets!

Second grade students worked on retelling the beginning, middle, and end of a story, which I highlighted in my last post. They have also been working on asking questions before, during, and after reading. Asking good questions about what we're reading really increases comprehension. We talked about how questions start with who, what, where, when, why, how, is, or are. To practice the skill we read two of my all-time favorite books--Sylvester and the Magic Pebble and Sam and Dave Dig a Hole. We watched Sylvester on BookFlix and read the physical version of Sam and Dave. I love watching and hearing kids listen to both of these stories. They both also have really great opportunities to ask questions. 

 

Third graders spent one more week determining characteristics of personal narratives. They read a book with a partner and looked for the elements that we had discussed, then they recorded their findings in our chart.

The last two weeks we have been working on inferencing. Inferencing is kind of a hard skill to teach/learn, because typically we do it without even thinking about it. The kids have been working on making inferences in class based on text evidence, but in library we've been reading wordless books and making inferences with those. The first book we read together was Sector 7. I actually took a picture of each page of the book and projected it. The pictures are very detailed and would have been hard to see, otherwise. 

This week, students worked with a partner to read through a wordless book and made inferences using the pictures. They recorded their inferences by describing the picture and telling the inference. They did a really great job, despite this being a hard task. It requires some metacognition to break apart the thinking that goes on when reading.

Fourth graders are wrapping up their Bloxels story retell projects. Hopefully I will figure out how to share out the games soon! 

Whew, that was a really fast recap of three whole weeks...next time, I'll do better to keep up!