Ask Me About Friday, March 15, 2019

We started our day with an assembly presented by Odyssey of the Mind.  These groups are presented a problem that they solve through a little play that they write and produce on their own.  They go to a state tournament to compete.  We watched three little plays this morning.  The children were so impressed and happy to see friends of theirs in the older grades participating.  We talked about how important it is to let the performers know how well they did by complimenting them when we see them later in the halls or at aftercare.
We worked in reading small groups with rereading information texts and answering text dependent questions.  It's important the children use information from the text when they answer these questions, so I had the children show me where the information was in the book first before answering.  This is very difficult to get some children to do that because they are so confident of what they know.  They often know more than what is in the book, but the purpose of these lessons is for the children to use the text and illustrations/photographs to respond.  In fact, although the children are very good at studying and talking about photographs each morning, when they read, sometimes they are just "off to the races" and reading to finish the book instead of understand the story or text.  We also used the table of contents to find where information would be in the book, if it had a contents page.  We practiced stopping as we read, studying the pictures, and reading any captions, vocabulary boxes, diagrams or any other text features on the page to be sure we understood the information the author was giving us through the text and illustrations.  You can do this with your children as well as you read with them.  Stopping along the way to clarify a story or to check understanding of the text is a habit we want the children to have as they begin to read longer and more challenging texts.
We visited Tennessee today as we continued reading across the U.S.A.  We read a book by Patricia Polacco called John Phillip Duck about the ducks at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis.  We heard a fictionalized account, based on the true story, of how the ducks came to swim in the fountain at the Peabody hotels.  After we read the book, we looked at a couple short videos that showed the ducks swimming, riding the elevator and walking the red carpet, and going to their rooftop homes.  

I'm sorry we didn't get our Read to Me, Talk to Me books passed out.  We have been so busy, and we had visitors at the end of the day which took a little longer than expected so I have time to pass them out.  I'll send them Monday, and if you want to keep them longer than until Thursday, that is fine by me!

Have a great weekend!
Miss Wolfe