Q and U Wedding

Q and U got married yesterday! They promise to spell together through earthquakes, quicksand and quiet times.  Congrats to Q and U!

Chicken Dance

We've been talking about characters during our reading time, so I thought it would be fun to do some art and writing responses with Chicken Dance.  We talked about the characters and did a comparison of the ducks and chickens.  We also wrote about our favorite parts.  Finally, we got to draw our favorite characters and watercolor them in.  They turned out so cute!

We have chickens, ducks and "Elvis Poultry"

Goldilocks Retelling

We've been working on a lot on talking about books and retelling stories lately.  This week, we practiced retelling Goldilocks and the Three Bears in different ways.  First we used a timeline to retell as a class and then we made these journals to help us retell the story in order.  Tomorrow we will do a reader's theater version of it! These are all great ways to help us retell using character names, details, words like "first" "next" and "last" and to help us retell in order.

Reading Buddies

I started bringing in 2nd grade buddies two mornings a week to be my 'teacher helpers.'  They stay for 15 minutes and I assign them to a different student each time.  They will help do heart word practice and games or just sit and read with the kids.  We love having our buddies come!

Reading with Sticky Notes

We have been working a lot on how to talk about books and using the word 'because.' This week, each student received four sticky notes with each of the strategies we've been talking about.  The heart represents their favorite part, the lightbulb is something new they learned, the person is a connection they made and the exclamation point is something cool they found.

First, they start off by sitting back to back so they can quietly read their books and look for places to mark with their sticky notes to share later. They have a mixture of non-fiction, fiction and books they can read all the words too in their boxes. 

 

After about 5 minutes, I call out EEKK which stands for elbow to elbow and knee to knee.  This is their sharing position.  This is when they turn and share their sticky notes.  We've been talking a lot about being good listeners and also how to use the word because. 

Square Cat

I love reading the book Square Cat with my class, it is a great story to talk about friendship and how it's ok if our friends are different than us.

 This square cat is a glyph, so when we are done we will graph the different ways our friends responded to the questions.

Thanks for the idea from Chalk Talk 

Vowel Surgery

We practiced our vowel sounds today by having a vowel surgery day! This was inspired by Kickin It In Kindergarten.  We took our jobs super seriously and called each other Dr. the whole time.  We had to put the vowels in the right words in order to cure our patients.  We recorded all of our work in our patient charts.  

The class totally ran with it and were listening to the patient's heartbeats and taking their blood pressure to help cure them!

We set the stage by playing heartbeat monitor sounds in the background, wore masks and made doctor hats.