Category Archives: authors

3rd Grade Phonics

I am sure by now you know that we practice phonics every day in 3rd grade. Last year we began an official program to help all grades K-5 standardize and tighten up their phonics instruction. The program we are now using is called Sunday, and it has five basic parts. Every day kiddos read sounds, write sounds, read words, write words and then learn some new material. Every 5th lesson we have a Mastery Check and kiddos show how they can transfer the lessons they are learning into new situations. Are you ready to see what it looks and sounds like? Here we go!

First we read sounds and write sounds. These are review as well as new ones we’ve learned so far in 3rd grade.

Reading and writing sounds

Next we read words (and a few sentences).

Reading words
Reading Sentences

Next we write words. These words include sounds we’ve learned together as well as sight words that we have practiced.

Writing words

After we review, then we learn something new. In this lesson, students are introduced to two new sets of sounds that come after a short vowel at the end of a word. I know it sounds funny, but I do not remember learning this as a child! At least not the “why” of them and/or how to use them. That’s one of the things I love about what we’re doing here: talking to kiddos about what to do as well as the reason why they should do it! Makes it so much easier to apply a “rule” if you know why!

New material: ff, ss, zz, ll

We learned how ff, ss, zz, and ll are double letters after a short vowel!

More new material: -ck

Did you know that -ck is the /k/ at the end of a word after a short vowel? We do now!

I love this hard thinking and work we do every day with phonics! I love that we start with it, as it allows us so many opportunities to practice and apply the new learning throughout the day as readers and writers!

We are learning so many new things about how sounds and words work. What do you remember about phonics?

Misunderstood Principal Shark?

I love Twitter.  I love Twitter for lots of reasons, but one of them is because things like this pop up sometimes:

And then I’m in the right place at the right time and we win SHARK SWAG for our whole school!!  The WHOLE SCHOOL!?  Pretty cool, right?  And because we’ve gotten book swag from Ame Dyckman before, I knew it was going to be great. 🙂

So after a few messages where we exchanged information and numbers and such we got a super box in the mail:

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I ran right to Ms. Davis to start brainstorming how we’d get all this fabulous stuff into our Roadrunner’s hands, and to open that awesome box!  We found 600 bookmarks and stickers and the nicest note from one of the nicest authors around. 🙂

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We made a plan for something fun, and it included a shark costume, a principal and a read aloud.

In the meantime, my class got busy divvying up the bookmarks and stickers so they’d be ready for everyone on the special day.  All the while I told my first grade friends about part of the plan, but that they had to cross their hearts to NOT TELL ANYONE about the secret book swag.  I also kept the rest of the plan (the shark-principal-read aloud part) a secret and told them they’d find out later.


We had to reschedule once, but finally it worked out for today’s big event.  We sent a generic “tune into Facebook Live at 2:45–it will be worth it!” email to the school and crossed our fingers.  I corralled some of my 1st grade and kindy friends to be present for the actual read aloud and we were set. 🙂 ❤

But when we showed up for the actual read aloud, it was EVEN BETTER THAN I HAD EXPECTED!  I mean I’ve heard our fabulous principal read before, and I know she’s got some mad skills, but this was above and beyond.  I mean–the whole thing in a SHARK COSTUME!  It was just too much. 🙂 .

 

Check out how AMAZING a time it was in our library today!

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After we returned to our classroom, we did a few end-of-day things and then got busy delivering all those book goodies to our Robinson Roadrunner friends!  They were so happy get our (ok, well Ame Dyckman’s) swag and we were SO EXCITED to share it!

Thank you, so much, Ame Dyckman, for writing amazing books that we love to read and thank you, Mrs. Sisul, for being such an amazing ambassador for reading and books and fun in our school!! WE ARE SO LUCKY!!

A Fabulous First Grade Friday in February! :)

Sometimes we have whole days where great things happen!  Last Friday was just one of those days.  🙂

It started in the morning when we got to visit the 5th Grade Black History Museum.  For the past few years, 5th grade has done a project to research famous black Americans and then share their findings with the rest of us.  This year it was extra special for our class because we have LOTS of 5th grade siblings.

It started with an introduction by a few 5th grade greeters and a giant sign:

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Then we were able to walk quietly through the museum and learn about the exhibits from the 5th grade historians.

When we returned, we recorded some of our learning in Seesaw to share with each other and our families.  We were excited to notice that some of the people we heard about in the museum were not new to us, as we’ve been doing lots of reading of our own, including a great book I’ll share more about later, called 28 Days.

Later on in the afternoon, we got to show off our baking skills (which we first honed making pumpkin pie, remember?) as we made brownies to share with families in the Robinson Food Pantry which was open that evening.  All of the first grades baked a treat, which was accompanied by a sweet note.

See?  A fabulous first grade Friday! 🙂

Kindness Quilt 2.0

Over the last few years, our school has begun to look differently at Valentine’s Day, choosing to celebrate an entire week (or even month!) of kindness, rather than just one day of candy and treats.  We even had a team of teachers to brainstorm and share ideas that kids might do to show kindness, a calendar with suggestions and videos and displays around our school.

Another such idea that our whole school took on was the Kindness Quilt.  It was actually a project that my class started last year, but something that never made it to the blog!?  It was a project sparked by a book–as many of our best ideas are!–which we started with ourselves and then shared with others, eventually inviting our whole school to participate. 🙂

This year many kiddos and teachers knew it was coming, since they had made the quilt last year.  We all started again, though, with the same inspiration: the book The Kindness Quilt by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace.

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The story is about a little bunny who is also celebrating kindness in her school, looking for kind acts around her life as she goes through the week.  Instead of finding just ONE kind thing she did, she finds SO MANY she decides to make a quilt out of her random acts of kindness.  The quilt started with just herself and her classmates, then grew from the small bulletin board to the big one, and then eventually spread to other grades in her school.  OF COURSE we wanted our kindness quilt to do the same thing!

I invited (and reminded) the rest of Robinson to join in our quilt endeavor again, and asked for teachers to let me know who wanted to participate.  Very quickly classrooms started to tell us they needed supplies, so we got busy putting together supply bags for them to use.  What great counting practice!

Once we had shared quilt squares with so many classes, we also had to make sure we had made quilt squares of our own!  The directions were to 1) show your act of kindness on the white square using a torn-paper picture, 2)  use the words “Kindness is…” and tell about your picture, 3) matte your picture on a bigger colored square, 4) decorate the edges of your colored square.

(A quick aside on why they have to use torn-paper: first graders can always benefit from activities and movements that increase their fine-motor skills.  Using pinchers to tear small bits of paper helps strengthen their fingers, which helps in handwriting and other small movements.  Also, there is a different level of planning and thinking involved with making a picture out of tiny shards of paper than just drawing it with a pencil, and I want them to be challenged to think in a different way. 🙂 We have done this before, so they were not surprised by the request, but yes, there are still some who fuss about not being able to use scissors!!).

Once we had enough squares done to start mounting them, I pulled out the butcher paper and got to work.  Ms. Pachan and Makayla (a SUPER 5th grade helper who works in our room–and Makhi’s big sister!) helped out with this job, too.

Check out some of our AWESOME squares!

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And just so you can get a sneak peek of how our quilt will look (although at the end it will be MUCH MUCH bigger, here’s all the quilt squares as of Thursday afternoon):

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I can’t wait to share updates as it grows and grows and we continue to celebrate kindness, long after Kindness Week is over!

#classroombookaday UPDATE: Week of February 11, 2019

I gave a little sneak peek of the newest books last time I updated but here are the titles up close.  We’re up to 349 and are as excited as the first day–maybe more since we’re getting closer to the top of the wall every day! 🙂

IMG_7037(Btw, yes, I know there’s a book missing.  I hung the wrong one there last week.  Oops. 🙂 )

So this week we added these new books to our display:

Ok, so there are some of our newest favorites on this list, books that are new to us this year.  Everywhere Wonder was a great reminder that if you look at the world in the right way, there is wonder–and a story–everywhere! I loved this one as a writer, and will use it next year as we launch Writer’s Workshop.  Crankenstein was super funny, and we already knew we loved the illustrations from Dan Santat (um, hello, Rodzilla?  Genius!).  Grammy Lamby might just be the sweetest story ever about a secret handshake, and Whistle for Willie is a just plain classic. 🙂 . We continued our reading about important people (as well as enjoying another book illustrated by an author we know, Don Tate!) with She Loved Baseball, and read about another important person we recognized with Mae Among the Stars.  This one was written about Mae Jemison as a child, which is a take on her story that I’ve never seen before. The pictures were beautiful and the story was so real.  Kids could absolutely understand how THEY could become an astronaut when they grow up.  Oh, and see that Toy Story book?  That’s the one we got from the library when we won BINGO on World Read Aloud Day–Makhi and Hailey picked a favorite for us to keep in our classroom. 🙂

As I always ask, what did you read this week?  What should WE read next week?  Share your title suggestions in a comment down below! 🙂

#classroombookaday UPDATE: See What Happened There??

Did you see it?  Let me post the latest picture and see if you see what I see. 🙂

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We made it to 300 books!!

I finally got around to adding the numbers to the side the other day (yeah..200 was there for a bit and I’ll fix it soon…long story), and kids of all ages are interacting with the wall  in a new way.  Seems like first graders (who have read all these books) weren’t really able to fathom that there were that many–the wall is just filling up and they know they’ve read a lot, but didn’t know just how many.  “Big” kids were suddenly amazed that “little” kids had read so many books!  Funny how just having something to relate to make you see things in a new way.

And, as you can see, we’ve actually read MORE than 300 books!  We added 36 from World Read Aloud Day, and then finished the row with some from last week (plus a few that I haven’t had a chance to get up there yet).  It’s been fun to make plans for what we will do when we fill up the wall (right now the plan is to go up and over the ceiling!). 🙂

Since I just posted all the additions from WRAD, the list from this week is small, but they were good ones nonetheless:

The books we added this week are all so different, but all so great!  I remember first reading Yard Sale during the Global Read Aloud in 2016 when Lauren Castillo was the featured illustrator and LOVING it, and this class did, too.  Such a simple story with such deep ideas.  The Rescue of Winks in one in a series of books that are written about real animals from the Second Chance Ranch (and we even Skyped with the author the other day and got to meet lots of her animals friends!).

Trombone Shorty was a toe-tapping addition during our library visit on Tuesday,  and I Don’t Want to Be a Frog is a fun read-aloud with lots of voices and funny lines. :). I have a few more, but they’ll be included for next week since they’re not on the wall yet.

What did you read this week?  Leave us a comment and share your favorites! 🙂

 

#WRAD2019: We are READERS in Rm. 111!

What an AMAZING time we had this year on World Read Aloud Day!  As I mentioned in the beginning of my post about Word Collector, it was at the end of a really weird week at school. We were out on Wednesday and Thursday, but thankfully Friday was a fresh (and much warmer!) day back and we were ready for a great day of reading!

First of all, it was a SCHOOL-WIDE PAJAMA DAY!!  Coming to school without getting dressed?  Super day for sure, am I right??

We got there and started with our regular choice time, but also with a question to Rm. 111 friends about a title they might like to read for WRAD.  We got lots of good suggestions, and so then started our official day with one they had asked for, The Gingerbread Man Loose in the Zoo!

It was a fun one, like the rest in the series.  It was a great one for kiddos to join in to read with me!

After this start to our day, I shared the WRAD Bingo Card we’d be working to fill up during the day.

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We got right to it and were able to cross LOTS of things off very quickly!  PErhaps our favorites were READ WITH A SIBLING, READ UNDER A BLANKET and READ WITH A FLASHLIGHT!  You don’t ever get to do those things at school!

Next we went to the library to attend an author Skype that had been set up by Mrs. Davis and Skype Classroom.  Her name was Ellen Fischer and we found out she used to live in St. Louis!  She shared her thoughts about writing, and then read us a book she had written, If an Armadillo Went to a Restaurant.

We liked the story, which was about animals and what they eat.  I especially liked when she told us that the idea for the story came when she was in a restaurant with her grandson and was waiting FORVER for their food.  She got out the menu out and started talking to him about what different animals might order dinner.  Genius, right?  I LOVE it when “real” authors tell stories that kiddos can relate to, and she definitely emphasized the idea that ideas for writing can be found EVERYWHERE!

After the book, she let us ask her questions, which is always the best part of a Skype.  We learned that she didn’t like to read when she was a kid, but when she was in college she came to Washington University and got an opportunity to work with kids and was hooked!  She told us about other books she’s written and Makhi got to make a request that she write her next book about football. 🙂

After lunch, we were blessed with our first guest reader!  Zach’s mom came to join us and brought along two books we had never read!  One of them, The Seven Silly Eaters, was by both an author I know, and an illustrator I love.  I’m so glad to be introduced to good stories!

After she finished this one, we realized we only had one square left before BINGO, so we asked her for a favor.  Because Mrs. Vanderbunt is a good sport, she let us take her outside to read the next one.  This one was The Underpants Zoo, which was also new, and was just plain silly!

So you know what that meant?

We headed to the library to visit Mrs. Davis and she let us choose a new book for our class.  We didn’t get to read it yet (Friday was a little busy! hee hee), but Hailey and Makhi chose a Toy Story book for us to read together. 🙂

Ok…next we had an opportunity for all of first grade to listen to a story from a mystery reader!  Kiddos were given a choice of 9 different titles (without knowing who would read it!), and they got to go to whichever one sounded interesting.  In addition to our first grade team, our first grade assistant Ms. Pachan, our REACH teacher Mrs. Moore, Mrs. Sisul (our principal), and Isaac and Jonah’s mom–Mrs. Rappaport–had a story to share!  Check out the choices:

This was a great time for students to spend time with another caring adult, who may not be their own teacher.  It was important for kiddos to see that all the adults in our school (and in their lives!) are READERS!!  Oh, and not surprisingly, most kiddos chose Elephant and Piggie. 😉

Even though we’d been busy reading all day already, we were NOT FINISHED YET!  After specials, our very own Lucy read us a book she’d written about how to get ready for school, and we got another bingo on our card!

THEN we went to the library again for ANOTHER author Skype, this time with Julie Fortenberry (who was new to all of us!).  She read us TWO BOOKS!

We ended our day with some quiet time (because man, we were TIRED!) with a birthday treat for our friend Will.  We’d missed his birthday on one of our days off and he brought Oreos!

That sweet smile!  The second one is a little blurry, but it’s from when we were singing to him (and no, I didn’t get a video–boo!), and he LOVED it!  Happy Birthday, buddy!

Ok, one more collage.  I just shared the books that we read in our class.  Check out all the reading from ALL of first grade.  WOOHOO for BOOKS!!

Alright.  That’s it.  HA!  I mean, goodness–we were BUSY and had a FULL day of READING and FUN!

Did you celebrate World Read Aloud Day?  What did you read?  What did you do? Leave us a comment and tell us about it! 🙂

 

We are WORD COLLECTORS!

Whew!  This week was crazy!  Besides it being World Read Aloud Day on Friday, we had TWO “it’s-too-cold-to-go-outside-today” days off of school!  It was a nice refreshing mid-week break, but definitely made for a week where NO ONE knew what day it was. LOL

So…remember how last week I mentioned a super project that was sparked from another Peter H. Reynolds book we read?  Well, I finally have enough of it up and photographed that I can share it!

Last week as one of our read aloud we enjoyed hearing The Word Collector.   Basically, in the story, Jerome collects words that he hears and likes–short words, long words, funny words, nice words, you get the idea.  Eventually he ends up have a GINORMOUS bag of words on little slips of paper that he drops and they get all spread around, then being shared with the rest of the world!

We decided that as super readers and word-lovers ourselves, we could also collect words!  It really only took a quick mention of the idea for first grade readers and writers to be IN and start finding great words all over the place!  We “officially” worked on it for one reading/writing time, but I know they literally could have done it all. day. long.  I love how Sam and Jaxon, who were working together, said they collected pages and pages of words for 20 or 30 minutes but said, “I think we could do this for 20 or 30 more HOURS!”

Now, when something like this happens, I can’t ever decide if the best part is what happens in our room, or what happens when someone decides we should share the idea with other kids.  In this case, it may have been both.

I went ahead and covered the door in blue paper, which was supposed to look like the cover of the book. See?

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Then as a class (well our class and Ms. Turken’s kiddos, too), we decided what we might do to share our work with our school on our doors.  We agreed that we should have a picture of Jerome, telling our Robinson friends about our inspiration and the word collecting we began to do.

We decided rock-paper-scissors would be the best way to decide who would create Jerome, and so after many, many games, Makhi, Wyatt and Isaac became our illustrators.     They made a most-handsome version of Jerome, and also a word bubble that we added words to together.

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Beckett helped add some words to our speech bubble, using interactive writing and his best first grade letters!

One of the best things that happened as we talked about what our speech bubble should say, was when Hailey suggested we invite other Robinson friends to collect words WITH US!?  I usually have an idea of what I think the words could say, but it’s generally up to kiddos to decide what they will say. Hailey had the great idea that we should invite the rest of Robinson to collect words WITH US, which I had not even considered.

On Friday we finally had time to get our lists and lists of collected words onto our slips and finish our Jerome and words.  We still have to add the pocket that will house the slips, tape, and sharpie for other people to use, but it’s up and it’s FABULOUS!  Don’t you agree?  I LOVE LOVE LOVE that these kiddos are already learning to pay attention to how words sound and think about the power they have!

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What words would you add to our display?  Please leave your suggestions in the comments and we’ll put them up for you!  Can’t wait to hear what you say and from how far away our words will come!  So in addition to your words, please tell us where you live!

#classroombookaday UPDATE: Week of January 21-25, 2019

Hi!  How are things where you are?  It’s COLD in Missouri, and we’re enjoying a day at home. 🙂 . I realized I didn’t update you on last week’s books, so here’s what the wall looked like last Friday, after another great week!  We are up to 291! 🙂

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We had a short week this week, so only added 10 titles.  They are all good ones though (Man, I say that every week don’t I?  I guess they’re ALL good titles!):

A couple of cool things happened this week with our books.  First of all, we read another SUPER book by Peter Reynolds, and it sparked ANOTHER super project (which I’ll share in the next few days! Stay tuned!), and also, Mrs. Fry brought out some really great big books!  I have been in first grade for almost a decade altogether, but somehow I forget about those!  And goodness–I should bring them out more often–what fun it was to read together and also hear a new story!  Plus everyone can see so easily!  We read a new David book this week (Thanks, David Shannon!  Those are always a hit!), and also enjoyed a new story about the Hindu holiday, Holi.  It was BEAUTIFUL and we all wanted to read it again. :).  I did not get this title on the wall until after this picture, but we also celebrated Children’s Multicultural Book Day on Friday and Mrs. Davis read Outside My Window to us, sharing the importance of seeing the world outside ourselves and reading texts that show the whole world!

What did you read this week?  What do you suggest for us? 🙂 . Stay warm and happy reading!

#classroombookaday UPDATE: Week of January 14, 2019

Another SUPER week in our first grade reading world!  We’re up to 281 (woohoo!–more than halfway to the top!) and read some good ones this week.  First check out the updated display:

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Here’s what we added this week:

You will notice some more fraction titles, and a couple of Cinderella books I somehow forgot to post until now.  What?  I am so obsessed over this wall display I usually get the pics up the MINUTE we are done with them. LOL. Better late than never, I guess. :). We added a ShowMe nominee book–Seven and a Half Tons of Steel–during our library visit on Tuesday, and it was a great one.  I had NO idea there was a ship made out of the Twin Towers!  Art & Max delighted us with great illustrations (as David Wiesner books often do!), and since it was snowy recently, we read some great winter snow books, too.  One of our favorites was Rodzilla (which I think kids love EVERY year!) and also a reread of The Invisible Boy.  We’re excited to add more books about problem solvers to the wall for next week, so stay tuned for some great books about great people! 🙂

It’s not on the wall yet, but I hope to share the book Kate suggested in the comments from a few weeks ago, too–My Hair is a Garden.  It was beautiful! Have a great reading week, friends, and don’t forget to leave us some suggestions for what we should add in our upcoming choices!