Week of October 16

It was kind of a crazy week at Prairie Hill last week! I was gone on Monday at a conference called ITEC. I think this was the 11th ITEC I've attended. It was a great day, as always. I learned a few new things that I was able to bring back and implement right away, as well as getting a lot of new ideas for the future! I love attending conferences that both motivate and inspire, and this definitely did that. I ordered a book from one of the speakers, Dean Shareski, called Embracing a Culture of Joy: How Educators Can Bring Joy to Their Classrooms. He has a TED Talk about the subject, as well. I can't wait to open the book up!  

We also celebrated America Reads day on Friday! We welcomed almost 80 readers into our school! Thanks to all of you who came in and read with kids. 

Our student council reps helped welcome visitors into the building!

Our preschoolers listened to Let's Go Apple Picking and picked out another non-fiction book to check out. 

AK kids listened to I Really Like Slop which is an Elephant & Piggie story. 

Kindergarteners read Leaves Fall Down. They've been studying trees during science, so we also worked together to draw what a tree looks like in the Autumn.

First graders have been reading non-fiction and learning about how non-fiction and fiction are different. This week, students thought about whether they would like to write fiction or non-fiction if they were an author. They drew an idea in the Seesaw app and then recorded themselves talking a little bit about their story. 

Second graders started learning about poetry in their classrooms this week. In library, we read one of my favorite poems, The New Kid on the Block and had a great conversation about how what we think about someone isn't always true. Then, kids had two different centers that they went to: they listened to funny poems on poetry4kids.com or they read books of poems at a table. 

Third grade is working on the skill of asking and answering questions while reading to improve comprehension. This week, we used a Google Doc to record questions we had about a book before reading (looking at the cover & title), during reading, and after reading. I tried something new and everyone recorded their questions into the same Doc, which was a bit of a learning curve, but we got it done! The book we read together was called Mister Whistler. 

Fourth grade continued reading The One & Only Ivan and talking about theme. They worked in a small group to determine which of the major themes they've been talking about in class applied most to our story. 

A couple of the classes tried an activity that I was reminded about at ITEC called Blackout Poetry. The idea is that you take a page from a book, and circle certain words/phrases while blacking out the others to form a poem. The idea was for the kids to create a new poem from the pages either about a character or a theme of the story.