Wow! Where does the time go??? I truly intend on doing a blog update about once a week, but this year has seriously gotten away from me! So here's a quick glance at what we've been up to over the past few weeks!
Things are gettin' real!
We have been working so hard! We have been practicing our Read to Self time since the first full week of school! Kids get to pick a comfy, cozy place in the room to sit and read. We have been working on building up our stamina so that we can sit and focus on just our book for a full 20 minutes. We are doing great and figuring out where our favorite places are in the room!
Working in groups
Students have had some opportunities to work with others in groups this year too! We worked on identifying complete, run on and incomplete sentences, as well as expanding sentences the first week. Then this week we started working on Main Idea and details so we looked at some pictures of items in a bag and decided on the main idea of the bags.
reading strategies
We have also done a quick overview of some important reading strategies to get us going! We talked about Making Connections from the books we're reading to our own lives, Thick and Thin Questions, Making Inferences and Visualizing as we read. One of my favorite lessons with Visualizing is when we read the poem "My Neighbor's Dog is Purple". I read the first 3/4 of the poem to the kids and have them draw what the neighbor's dog looks like in their mind (left side of the glasses on the people). Then I reveal the last stanza of the poem and then the kids have to draw their new version of what the dog looks like when they get a little more information (right side of the glasses)! The kids laugh and get a kick out of how just a few words can drastically change how we see something!