five favorite things from reading and writing workshop

it's friday... here are our favorite things this week!

partner guided reading

our primary classrooms continue to work on nonfiction units of study. during a partner guided reading lesson (which was a new format for us) we had two students work together to read a book while getting coached by the teacher.

click here for partners work together sheet (you add the pictures)

the lesson format below for day one with the book penguins by kate briggs....
this book was at the children's instructional level (G/H)

• let’s take a sneak peak and think what is this book going to teach us.
• look at a few pictures(not the whole book)… 
• what are you thinking about? let’s go back to the begin and let’s read it together .
• you can choral read, echo  or see saw read(see saw read worked the best).
• the teacher coaches the partners to read the book together.
• now let's retell what the book was mostly about.  

tactile experience for leaning letters

we have a wonderful reading intervention teacher who works with primary students. she shared these beautiful colored squares that she uses for kids to practice writing the letters or sight words on. she reminded us that sometimes kids need that tactile experience when learning... thank you louise! we love this 

interactive writing 

our kindergarten team is working hard at squeezing in interactive writing every day (for at least ten minutes).  we love how this class wrote about the story the mitten.

how might the character's be thinking or feeling ?

 

hammering it home with interactive writing

using our conventions notebooks, we have been building a big anchor chart about the conventions. we photograph actual work from student notebooks to use for the visuals and we work together as a class to write the message.

we love anchor charts created with the kids!

 Writing with a Purpose 

we giggled when laura found this letter in the hallway... dear tom brady i love your work and your awesome i know you are in houston. go crush those stupid falcons.  love, jack

like jack's letter... we hope the patriots crush the falcons but we don't think the falcons are stupid.

 

go pats! 

jessica & laura & melissa 

five favorite things at reading and writing workshop

our favorite things this week...we loved having our students act out some of the problems they have encountered while reading. a helpful anchor chart  we used was the drop that bad habit chart. the children are realizing that reading nonfiction books can be tricky.

this anchor chart was created in our first unit of study

first-graders had a TEA party celebrating the books they are reading.  how do you have a tea party? all the children come to the rug and learn that at a tea party you get to chit-chat with a friend about something important to you.  for this tea party students get to chit chat about some of the facts they are learning from their nonfiction books.  it's tea party time! 

we have been using many of the strategy lessons from  jenn serravallo's book (we 💜 this book). in the lesson below, students had to read the words, look at the picture and think, what in the picture is the same as what's in the words? what's new? next students had to try to write extra facts from looking at the picture.

example created by the teacher

tiny tip: we found using books with heavy picture support works best.

giraffes have long necks.

plants can die and cars get ruined

another strategy lesson we implemented was one in which the children reread a part of their book to add more details.  we were excited to try this lesson out because rereading books is such an important part of our workshop time.

this lesson takes rereading one step further by having students read, sketch and think about adding more details to their initial thoughts. each time they sketched they thought more about what they learned and deepened their understanding about the topic.

click here if you would like this sheet

another lesson the kids loved in the getting smart about nonfiction reading was the mini-lesson on chatting and learning. in this lesson the children learned about the power of conversation and they learned that sometimes we find the most interesting information and we are introduced to new topics because of our friends.

we hope you had a fabulous fantastic friday!

jessica & laura & melissa