Ask Me About Thursday, September 24, 2015

Today we had a class meeting and discussed waiting.  We read Waiting Is Not Easy, by Mo Willems and discussed times when we have to wait.  Mo Willems' books have limited text that are often some of the first "real" books our beginning readers can read.  We will be reading more Mo Willems books as we do an author study about him and his style of writing.  For our class, waiting is hardest when they have to wait to add something to a class discussion.  We talked about why it is important to wait for a turn instead of blurting out answers.  
We looked at a wordless picture book today called Deep In the Forest, by Brinton Turkle. Ask me to tell you about this story!  This is an interesting book because as one of our students pointed out, this is the opposite story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  Instead of a little girl coming in to the home of a family of bears, this story is about a baby bear who comes in to a human family's home.  Wordless picture books are really important to beginning readers and writers because they give the child an opportunity to study the pictures and tell the story in their own words.  It's important children have the opportunity to tell stories, either with wordless picture books, about events or things they are interested in, and in looking at family pictures.  I will be posting a list of wordless picture books on our reading page in the next couple days with more information about "reading" wordless picture books with your child.
Today we sang a fun song called Happy Mooday to You.  As you will soon find out when you hear your child sing this song, it is the Happy Birthday song for a cow.  We worked with the word "to" and learned about drawing and labeling pictures.  We will continue to work on illustrating by talking about what is important to include in the picture to tell the story.  Labeling pictures is also a great activity for beginning writers because they don't have to mess with all the conventions of writing; they are just stretching out one word at a time instead of sentences.  
We collected data today about the most interesting bug out of four pictures.  We made a pictograph and talked about the information we could get from the data we collected.  

We have begun our Maryland testing and are moving through it as quickly as possible.  I was hoping to start reading groups, but will concentrate most of the time on finishing this testing and just calling a group or two a day until it is finished.  Hopefully that will be by the end of next week.

Have a great evening!
Juliet