Sorry–this post is a little late. 😦  I’ve been having printer trouble lately (on a side note, if you know how to get your Canon printer to talk to macOS Sierra 10.12, let me know! Ugh.), and couldn’t get my pictures printed in time to get them on the door until after the weekend (so yes, you’ll get Week 11’s update this week, too!  YAY!).

Last week we read 16 books, and are now up to 177!  I love how we’re so close to filling up the door.  I DON’T love how I didn’t print our pictures on card stock or laminate them or anything and now they’re curling and messy.  Oh well, just don’t pay attention to that part, but instead check out what we read! Please? 🙂

Last week we added several more Mo Willems books, but they were Pigeon books this week, rather than more (or new) Elephant and Piggie ones.  We were working on a punctuation study, and so were investigating a variety of texts to see what we noticed about how authors use punctuation to create meaning.  I quickly realized that besides being funny and full of speech bubbles (which have been a great addition to writing, too!), they are LOADED with pretty much every punctuation mark, too!  It’s been great to watch how kids’ noticings and wonderings about what they see has changed since we started studying them.  So, thanks, Mo Willems–it’s been great teaching with you lately!

Last week’s total also included a couple of read alouds by Ms. Holzmueller, who works in our room and with our grade level every day.  She shared Where the Wild Things Are, Yoda, and Pete the Cat: A Pet for Pete, and BY GOLLY is she good at it!  Kiddos love to listen to the way she reads (especially because it’s different than listening to me all the time!), and she has a great way of including kiddos in the story, asking them to make faces and movements, answer questions and share their thinking (again, in a different way than I do).  Plus, I forgot how helpful it is to watch someone else teach your class, and how you pick up tips and tricks that others do that work with your students but that you may not have thought of or tried before.

We celebrated Halloween on Friday of this week, so we enjoyed some Halloween-themed books like Pumpkin Heads, The Pumpkin Book, Which Witch is Which, as well as Frankie Stein and Frankie Stein Starts School.  The last two titles are by Lola Schaefer, and were shared with us from our Rm. 203 friends, because they are planning an author Skype with her later this quarter.  We loved them, so maybe we’ll jump onto their Skype plan, too!

Oh, and we were inspired to read our final Ame Dyckman book (Tea Party Rules) when we opened an amazing box of book swag from her on Thursday. 🙂

Can’t wait to share this week’s books with you soon!  I LOVE BOOKS! (can you tell?)

Oh, and if you missed our recent post on our Literary Lanterns, will you check it out, please?  We had so much fun and did so much great thinking through decorating our character pumpkins. 🙂