Working hard!

     Writing-

     We have our Writers Workshop up and running! It is exciting to see the students working on writing each day. We only did free writing this week, but will be starting an actual writing unit next week.

     Each day I try to call back 2 small groups of writers to do conferences with. This week our focus was punctuation and capitalization. As the year goes on we will focus on word usage, adding ideas, and publishing their work. 

Hard at work during writing

Using the Dictionary!

One of my writing groups

hard at work.

During reading we have started working with a reading partner so a big focus this week was working at a Level 1 whisper voice when working with a buddy.

We also worked on metacognition (thinking about our thinking/reading) using wordless picture books. The kids "read" a book with their group and then posted their thinking using our thinking stems (I predict, I wonder, I noticed...)

Working together to read a book

Using their metacognition

Pictures of their thinking about the wordless books 

"When I read Flora and the Flamingo I was wondering why she wanted to be a flamingo."

Every day during reading we have been doing some SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) working on our reading stamina. The goal is 15 minutes each day so that students are reading their own book that they can then write to me about. 

Part of our discussion was that students need to pick good fit books. These books shouldn't be so easy that they speed through them or so hard that they struggle to get through each page. 

I brought in different types of shoes to show that each book has a purpose (golfing, running, or (my favorite idea from a kiddo) date night). We also talked about how it was too hard for me to walk in Mr. Cox's shoes and our student shoe was too small for me so they weren't good fits. 

A big part of LEAD21 is doing research and inquiry. This week the students looked through our first theme readers and chose some ideas for research projects for our first unit.

Finally, because we couldn't go outside this week we have been doing some brain breaks in the classroom. I snapped a couple of pictures of one of the dances, it was so fun to watch and they were so much more focused afterwards!