And So It Begins

     Wednesday was our first official day of school. I love that we start on Wednesday, it gives me time to ease back into our school routine. For the first time in two years, I have a brand new to me class, so we spent a lot of time practicing routines and procedures. We used the conversation starters from Amy Lemons and Hope King's Back 2 School Engagement Made Easy unit to get to know each other and practice our partner talk procedures. These students were really good listeners; they could always tell what their partner said when asked.

     Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse by Kevin Henkes is one of my favorite back to school read alouds. Before we read, I told the students I wanted them to pay attention to how Lilly feels as different events happen in the story. As we read, I stopped at a couple of places to have them predict how Lilly was feeling after different events. Then we brainstormed Lilly's different feelings and added them to our chart. 

     We also started our self portraits. I love to do self portraits at the beginning and end of the year to see how much their abilities grow.  The students were pretty impressed with their drawing skills. On Thursday and Friday, we finished our portraits, created our all about me flap books, and then mounted our finished products on construction paper to display in the hallway. Both activities are from  Amy and Hope's Back 2 School Engagement unit. I'm so proud of how they turned out. 

      We review and practiced our rules using activities from my Classroom Rules Pack. 

     We also read Edward the Emu and used the predictions activities from Amy Lemons and Katie King's Rooted in Reading August unit. The students were excited to set up and begin using their reading notebooks. I can already tell I have a deep thinkers like this sweetie.

     My own boys started 1st and 5th grade this week. My step-son starts his sophomore year on Monday. Time seems to be moving so very quickly. 

                                      

    

     

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Characters Have Feelings! and a Freebie

     Last week we focused on characters, their feelings, and how story setting affected their feelings. On Monday and Tuesday, we read two different stories about the beginning of school. We charted the characters, setting, and feelings for both stories as a class. On Monday I modeled. On Tuesday I modeled the first one, and then allowed students to to tell me the rest and support with evidence from the text.

     On Wednesday we read Pirates Go To School again. Then we created an anchor chart about character feelings and discussed examples from the book to add as our chart example. Then students recorded characters, feelings, and setting from the book.

     You can grab this freebie here. The students did really well with this activity independently. 

Back to School with Pirates

     During the first week of school, our reading and writing activities centered around the book, Pirates Go To School by Corinne Demas. All of my students were super pumped about the pirate book!

     On the first day, we read the story and focused on the Pirates' character traits. I modeled identifying the traits and using evidence from the text to confirm the character traits. Then we charted  their character traits and the students had to support their answers with evidence from the text. I teach two classes, so I recorded one set of answers on one color sticky notes and the other classes' answers on different color sticky notes.

     

     Then we sorted some pirate and school words by the number of syllables in each word. 

     On Thursday, we read Pirates Go To School again. This time we focused on the characters and setting. As we read, we identified the characters and the setting. Then we created an anchor chart and sorted pictures as an example of characters or setting.

     We also put pirate and school words in alphabetical order. 

The syllable sort and abc order activities will be added to a literacy station once we begin stations.

     We also worked on writing stories about what would happen if pirates were in our class. On Friday, we made pirates to go with our writing. The pirate patterns are from Rachel Lamb. You can get them here. 

      You can get my pirate activities in my store. 

      It was a successful first week of school!

Making Connections with Snowmen

We read Snowmen at Night and then created a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast our class with the Snowmen. Then we made these cute snowmen as art response to our poem Little Snowman.

Mr. Grinch

We read The Grinch who Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss. We used the story to focus on characters and motives. 

We used it to review text to self, text to text, and text to world connections.

We wrote our text to self connections about what makes us grumpy and happy.

We also wrote about what we would do to make the Grinch grin and made the Grinch.

Characters and Motives

We have been learning about characters and their motives for doing and saying things in stories to help us better understand what we read and what is read to us. We introduced this by reading Auntie Claus. I modeled the first three examples on our chart. Then for the last two, the students talked with their partners and I wrote down what they discussed. We also reviewed theme or the big idea of the story. All the students agreed that the big idea was it is better to give than receive. We talked about how we can give our time to help someone else that giving is not just material things.