Literary Pumpkin

We decorated our class pumpkins to look like Humpty Dumpty, the King's horses and the King's men. We are very thankful that Mrs. Long and Mrs. Owens were able to help the kids paint and decorate the pumpkins. They are so adorable!

Rice Krispy Treats!

We made Rice Krispy Treats last week! The students took turns putting each ingredient in and being the photographer. Students wrote about the steps involved in making our Rice Krispy Treats and then enjoyed them the next day after our Literary Parade!
Rice Krispy Treats on PhotoPeach

Question of the Day!

Each day as part of our Math Workshop, we have a question of the day. Students or I come up with the question and then each student has a turn answering yes or no. It is a great way to learn about each other and also model how to collect data, chart it, add the numbers up, and compare how many people said yes to how many people said no. Below is a question of the day from last week.

Where the Wild Things Are

Students love the book, Where the Wild Things Are. It is one of our "Star books," which means we read it quite a few times for repetition and we also study vocabulary words from the book. If you haven't heard the word "rumpus" yet, you will soon! In the book, Max and the Wild Things have a wild rumpus. This means that they sing, dance, and party wildly. Our class now loves to sing our "Reader's Workshop" like a wild rumpus.

The Itsy Bitsy Spider

Reading Partners

Students have the opportunity to not only read independently during Reader's Workshop, but also to read with a partner. Students sit knee to knee, shoulder to shoulder and share one book together. They take turns "reading," retelling, and/or sharing their favorite part of the book. This interaction and communicating about books is very important so that students see that discussing books is just as important as reading them. You will also see a few more of our reading stations.
1)Students practice matching rhyming pictures. 2)Students clap out syllables for picture cards and determine how many syllables each word has. 3) Students match lowercase letters and uppercase letters. 4) Students look at picture cards and say the word out loud, then determine what the beginning sound is. There are so many ways that different FUN ways for students to "play" and learn with literacy skills!
Reading Partners on PhotoPeach

Morning Message

One of the things we include in our daily Skills Block is a "Morning Message." A morning message consists of two or three sentences that I write in front of the students. I leave out missing letters, vowels, blends, sight words, letter combinations, and punctuation. Students are called up to fill in the missing part. When we first began morning message, only a few letters were missing and they were mostly beginning sounds. Now, students are filling in beginning sounds, ending sounds, missing vowels, blends, letter combinations, and punctuation. Students try to remember that the first letter in the sentence has a capital letter. We also have discussed that the letter I (all by itself) is always capital as well as names. We try to decide what type of punctuation is needed at the end of each sentence. The morning message is a great way to cover so many skills in such a short period of time. It also allows me to make the skills multi-level, so that students who do not know all of their letters/sounds yet can practice those skills and the students who are ready for the next level of skill can be challenged with more difficult skills. In the morning message below, we filled in missing letters in black, underlined blends and digraphs in green, circled sight words in red, and came up with rhyming words down at the bottom in purple.