#classroombookaday UPDATE: Week 6

Wow–I feel like every week I say “I can’t believe it’s been this long already!” but again, I say I can’t believe it’s been SIX WEEKS of the bookaday challenge. But even more, I can’t believe we’re already at 124 books!! I love that some said today, “I wonder if we’ll get to 1000 soon!” Ok, so maybe it means I need to do some more place value work, but I also think it speaks to the love of reading and books that is growing in Rm. 202. And I love it!

Beyond just sharing the “door picture” like I’ve been doing every week, I want to highlight a little about what has happened with some of the books we read this week, as well as some wonderings that have come up this week as we’ve been reading.

First our latest picture:

I feel like I say this every week now, too, but looking at this just makes me happy!

We started the week reading a book recommended by Mrs. Sisul when she was in our room last time–Up and Down by Oliver Jeffers. We’re already fans of Stuck and Lost and Found, and had wanted to try some others (I have a couple of others in the TBR basket right now actually!). We were supposed to take a vote after we read it and let Mrs. Sisul know if she should share that one with the rest of Robinson, too, and we voted YES!

A quick favorite this week was Are We There, Yeti? by Ashton Anstee, which we actually learned about because of our love of all things Emily Arrow. Oh, come on, you know her–the Dot Day song lady. Well…since we’re subscribed to her YouTube Channel, we know there are loads of other great book/song combinations she’s created, and this was one of them. I’m posting the song below, but beware, it’s very catchy!! I’m planning on using the lyrics to this song as our shared reading text next week, which I think will be really cool.

We added two more Elephant and Piggie books this week (how you can not LOVE those?): I Will Fly Today and Can I Play Too? Both were great, but we laughed especially loud at the joke in CIPT: the friend who wants to play is a snake, and Elephant and Piggie are trying to play ball. Lots of craziness ensues, but the end is a happy one where the snake thanks them for playing “with” their friend. Yep–they throw him! We definitely LOL’d when we saw that one. 🙂 And speaking of Elephant and Piggie (thanks Mo Willems for writing these amazing little gems!), we ended the week with a box from Amazon that had two new books in it!! Thanks Raebers! We’re excited to read I Love New Toy on Monday. 🙂

Kaiden brought in a big pile of books from home this week (I love that kids are starting to do that regularly and share their favorite titles with the rest of us!), and we shared two of them so far: Zoo Looking by Mem Fox and Please, Mr. Panda by Steve Antony.

We have a Mem Fox author box in our library, so Kaiden thought this would be a good one to read to introduce our class to her writing. He brought Please, Mr. Panda because we’ve been working so hard on using kind words and being respectful. That one hdd a great lesson about how it feels when people are rude to you as opposed to how it feels when others use manners. We liked them both and learned form them, too!

I found a great one–The Best Book to Read–at the library on my last visit and was excited to finally share it with my kiddos on Thursday. We had a great conversation about what the “best” book to read would be, and how that means something different to everyone. Mara suggested that every book is the best book to read. She ended up being right! This book also started some great conversations about libraries, and what special places they are, as well as an important discussion about library cards and what amazing treasures those can be! It started a plan for a walking field trip soon! We are so excited!

Lastly, Mrs. Sisul came back again (isn’t it amazing that our principal reads to us!?) to read Strictly No Elephants by Lisa Mantchev.

It was on her list during the first rotation of Principal Read Alouds, but I had her save it for a later time. Her visit today was purposely tied to our conversations lately about including everyone, being kind to others, and the fact that I had found an Emily Arrow song about it! Perfect, right?? I know, eventually I might stop gushing about her amazingness, but for now I’ll just share another song. 🙂

#classroombookaday UPDATE: Week 5

I feel like I should be sure to say thanks to Jillian Heise for the fabulousness that is #classroombookaday on Twitter. And I am so truly sorry if I ever seemed like I created it–I think I just started using it in my title so I didn’t have to retype it when I tweeted out my posts. Anyhow, what a great thing this has done (and is doing) in my classroom (and so many others!) to promote literacy, introduce readers to new books and to create so many great memories between me and my students.

Ok…this marks Week 5 since we started tracking our reading, and something very special happened–we hit 100 books!! I haven’t done it yet, but I feel like I should mark that book with a star or something (it was the Light and Sound book just for the record!), and also begin more seriously planning what in the world we’ll do when we fill up our door. The way the math is working, that will happen in about 6 weeks! That’s not even the halfway point of the year yet!

Dot Day 2016: Too Much Fun For Just One Day!

If you follow Dot Day or you have been to the official website, then you know the date for Dot Day is advertised as “Sept 15th-ish.” Now being a fan of the Reynolds brothers, I figure there’s probably a joke in there because of their amazing book Ish, but I also love that it probably just means teachers can have some freedom in when they celebrate. I mean, we all know that things like that can rarely fit so nicely right into our schedules.

We were able to take advantage of a great Skype invitation from Ms. Hachen’s 2nd Grade Ms. Hachen’s 2nd Grade class to take place on Sept. 15th, and so in order to have something to talk to our new friends about on that morning at 9 am, we did our “official” Dot Day work the day before. If you have visited 20somethingkids before, then you know Skyping is not a new thing to my kiddos, BUT this was to be the first one this particular class had made. I was excited and I’m pretty sure that until it happened, many of them didn’t know what we were doing. LOL

Ms. Hachen and I had planned to have our kiddos share their dot art, and tell the rest of the class what they decided to do to “make their mark.” We gathered on the floor in front of our screen and computer, and oh my goodness I wish I would have taken a video of what happened next. You can imagine I’m sure…I turned on Facetime just to give them an idea of what it would look like once we got started and everyone started making faces at themselves in the camera, putting bunny ears on their friends, waving their hands…you get the idea? I mean I guess I couldn’t really blame them–if you have never seen yourself on screen before like that and you are a 6YO, you’re probably going to do something goofy, right? So I asked them to get all those sillies out and then we waited patiently for our friends to call. They did, and we listened to our new friends from Kansas (hey, they’re our neighbors!) tell us about their Dot Day creations.

It looked and sounded a little like this:

You know, I love it when I watch videos of things that happen in our classroom, because I often notice or see new things that I didn’t notice in the moment. Honestly, I remembered that many kiddos were NUTS and had a hard time being patient as we watched and listened, and I remembered having to give many reminders for them to be respectful audience members. I’m so glad to see that most of them did a GREAT job of waiting, and am not surprised to see that there are still some who REALLY wanted to show off their art work. I’m going to take that as a sign that they were really proud–and that we need more practice with Skype. LOL No worries, we will get lots of that as we go through this year. 🙂

When we were finished with our Skype, we had some other things to do (like regular 1st grade curriculum stuff!), but we came back to another art challenge later in the afternoon. I had seen a blog post about creating a circle painting with your class and wanted to try it. After all the paint fun we’d had the day before (did I mention that we had to throw three kiddos’ clothes in the washer?), I needed to figure another way to make it work.

We didn’t exactly follow the directions, as we didn’t use paint, and I didn’t have them only paint circles, but we did indeed work together to make our marks on a class art piece together. That was really my big idea anyway, regardless of the medium.

So, we started with a big yellow piece of paper, 8 kiddos and a box of markers.

They were given 30 seconds to work at the part of the paper that was in front of them, and then we rotated around the table. They were supposed to add something new to the picture that they moved to next.

Not only did we create a BEAUTIFUL art piece together, but not a single person fussed during this time, nor did anyone argue, fight over a spot, or not follow directions. It was quiet, ran smoothly and kiddos seemed like there were really enjoying themselves! They took this “making our mark together” business really seriously. 🙂

And then when we were finished (we went through three rounds of 8 kiddos each), we had to do the most important part–sign it!

I have not had a chance to frame it yet, nor have I decided where to hang it (we should decide on that together, I think!), but I am surely impressed with what we were able to do. My favorite part? When I heard Johnny say to me as he rotated to the next spot, “I think this is supposed to be a carnival, so I’m going to add part to the roller coaster!” What a great example of paying attention to others’ intentions. Saw that happening all over the place after he said it. Way to go Johnny and Rm. 202 friends!

Just for fun, a few closer looks:

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Ok, and just one more. It was a good thing we had Double Dot Day, because on actual Dot Day I wore stripes to school. I know, wah wah. 😦 But I remembered the next time and was excited to sport the RIGHT outfit!

Oh, and look–they’re even DOUBLE DOTS!! Like it was meant to be. 🙂

What a great couple of days focusing on reading and creativity, helping and working together! Thanks for reading and ’til next year, keep on make, make, making your mark!!

Painting, Twister and a Song, Oh My!: Dot Day 2016

I have been a fan of Dot Day for a few years, and tried with my last couple of classes. Last year was the first year I seemed to get it on the blog, though, sharing our dot paintings and writing pieces that graced our hallway all year. They really were amazing. But as I went into this year’s Dot Day, I wanted to see what else there was out there to connect to the day and to the book it’s created from: The Dot by Peter Reynolds.

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Because of my participation in most things Twitter, I found out about some great resources to use for Dot Day activities, and even had a place to share our Dot Day fun! I was geared up for an even better Dot Day than last year, and when the day came, kiddos were as excited as me!

We started the day by reviewing our plans and then, of course, reading the story! And who better to share the story of The Dot than the author himself? Yep! We had Peter Reynolds read to us from this video on YouTube:

After that, I actually reread to Rm. 202 kiddos again, to make sure they “got” the story and so we could discuss what was actually happening and also how this story perfectly connects to our Robinson Mindset:

We used some discussion questions that had been shared with me from my Twitter friend Ms. Hachen, and these really helped us understand Vashti’s problem, how she solved it and then how she made her mark on someone else in the same situation.

Then we enjoyed a song. Two or three times because it was so great. 🙂

And then after we got the point of the day and our minds were focused on dots and making our mark, we got busy actually DOING it!

I had put together a flipchart to give kiddos a visual of their art options:

screenshot-2016-09-17-21-42-36 and basically anything that was round, or could make a dot was fair game. And once they got busy creating, we were AMAZED at what we could do! We made dots and watched them splatter. 🙂 And thanks again to the AMAZING Ms. Mimlitz who was our photographer and took some great action shots of our work!

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The final products are not quite ready to share (since I want to wait until they’re all hanging up and our writing is finished!) but you’ll get the idea as you check out our creative process. 🙂

Later on, it was time to have some more active Dot Day fun…

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This was both Dot Day-related, as well as a great opportunity for us to continue to practice managing our bodies and using self-control as we work together!

After we had made our physical marks, thought about how we were like Vashti and could make a mark on the world, we did some reflecting through writing using this sheet:

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We have done first drafts on these sheets, and will revisit and revise them next week so they can hang along with our paintings. I can’t wait to share them!

We had had a day full of DOT fun, and we had to end it with one more run through of the Dot Day Song. Just because it was so great! And we’ve all been singing it since then. 🙂

And to be honest, this wasn’t the end of the fun. Come back for the second half of our Dot Day extravaganza soon! There’s Skype and another art project to share!

Read With Your Roadrunner!

At Robinson we have a great tradition called Read With Your Roadrunner, where kiddos get to start their day reading with special people in their lives. Today was the first RWYR for this year. 🙂

We had lots of fun with our visitors today and we’re SO GLAD they came to start the day with us!

#classroombookaday UPDATE: Week 4

I cannot believe how much fun we’re having with #classroombookaday, nor how many books we’ve already read! For all I know, we usually read this many books in 1st grade together (I’ve never officially kept track), but regardless it’s SO GREAT to watch the pictures get added and begin to fill up the door!

This week I think we added almost 20 books and I’m not sure we can pick a favorite!

I do have to give a huge shoutout to Keira’s mom (loyal blog reader!) who left us some GREAT suggestions when she was at school for Read With Your Roadrunner today that she thought we would love. And BOY was she right! I had never seen Red: A Crayon’s Story or Clancy the Courageous Cow before today but they will definitely be added to my classroom collection! Both fit in perfectly (like she said they would!) with our conversations about valuing everyone for their uniqueness and celebrating how everyone can do something really well (even if that thing ends up being a surprise!). Thanks for the suggestions! Feel free to share your books with us anytime you want! (That request goes for anyone, by the way!) 🙂

Name Game (and a Couple of New Books!)

We have been working on names in Rm. 202, both as a way to build community as well as to use a resources for our reading and writing. We have read lots of books, built our names with Legos and inch tiles, as well as learned about the stories of our names and painted based on that inspiration.

And then we played games.

I moved our word wall this year, making it more accessible to kiddos and groups, and hopefully allowing us a place to gather to talk about words and how they work. The first thing we learned to do with our word wall is play a guessing game based on our names. A kiddo sat on the stool, and I gave 3 clues to a name, and they had to guess which one it was.

The first one had these three clues:

It’s a short name.
It has double letters.
The last letter doesn’t sound how you’d expect it to sound.

Kiddos guessed that it could be these options:

Pretty good guesses, right? We had a great conversation about how the “ie” in Allie and Robbie work together to make the long e sound, and they agreed that that fit the “doesn’t sound like you’d expect it to sound” clue. Peter’s name was suggested because it has double e in it, so I made sure they understood that the double letters had to be together. That left ELLA as the chosen name, and we found lots of other words that also fit that rule, including the A that sounds like a U. This will be a feature we’ll come back to many times as we read and write together this year.

Our second name had these clues:

It has 5 letters.
The vowel sound is a LONG one.
There is a silent letter.

The guesses this time were:

Pretty great thinking again, huh? Two of those names were ones I hadn’t even considered. Yeah, I know–pay attention, Mrs. Bearden! The one I was thinking of was CHASE, and we talked about silent e and long vowels.

This game was a great first start with our word wall, and it will become a game kiddos play again on their own, during word work in our Daily 5 or even as a part of our word work in guided reading or just for fun at choice time! Great work, Rm. 202 kiddos!

Oh, and I promised in the title I’d share a new book! Mrs. Meihaus has a habit of reading to our class when we come to the library for our checkout each week, and this last week she did not let us down.

She shared : screenshot-2016-09-01-12-46-51

which included several little surprises inside:

Can you see how the pages get smaller and smaller in there? It goes all the way down to a teeny tiny red book and then all the way back out again as you read through to the end. Who had ever seen such an amazing text like that before? WE LOVED IT!

Ok, one more. We heard the sweet, friendly story of:

screenshot-2016-09-01-12-46-11 Heartfelt and wonderful. Must read it again. 🙂

And learn to play the piano. 🙂

#classroombookaday Update: Week 3

Another week, LOTS more great titles! I thought it was fun to look at the pictures this way:

Or like this:

Week 1

Week 3

I think we’re up to 71 already! And yes, I guess it’s not really #classroombookaday, and more like #3or4booksaday, but hey–that’s not a hashtag yet. 🙂

The only probably is that there’s not enough time to read all the books we have on our list or in our basket!

What have you been reading? What suggestions do you have? 🙂

Principal Read Alouds

We are SUPER lucky to have a literary principal at Robinson School. Is that the right word for a book-lovin’, read-aloud-givin’, kid-supportin’ administrator who visits to share GREAT NEW BOOKS with students? Whatever you call it, we’re very blessed. I know some of it has to do with her past life as a teacher, but she’s also a mom, and a veracious reader herself. And she wants to share that with us! LOVE IT!

So…thus far she’s been in 3 times (which is pretty great since we’ve only been in school for 3 weeks!), and shared some great titles with us.

For her first visit she brought Excellent Ed, and helped us think about what we’re already great at, then make goals for things we’re still working on. This fit in perfectly with our butterflies. 🙂

Then she came back to read Stuck to us and teach us to “try one more time!” That lesson has come into play loads of times already, even just right afterwards when Nicholas was telling the story about how he learned to tie his shoes when his dad gave him one more demonstration. 🙂

And THEN she came back again today and read us a funny story that we can all pick up when we head to our Book Fair starting tomorrow (great timing, huh??), Mother Bruce. This was a great one, but on the first read I wonder if Mrs. Sisul and I thought it was funnier than Rm. 202 kids did. Oh well–the adults were entertained! LOL

Oh, and I must mention one more thing about this whole principal read aloud thing…I love Mrs. Sisul’s excitement for literacy and books and how she inspires my kiddos to be readers when she comes so jazzed up about books (and yes, that is definitely the right word for it!), but what I love even more is that she takes her time to show Robinson kids they matter by doing this, too. Goodness knows principals have tens of thousands of things to do in a day (all of which are important), but I appreciate that she makes time for kids first. My Rm. 202 friends know Mrs. Sisul as a friend, a reader, an adult with a connection, a lover of humor, someone with grit and most of all a person. She’s not just a disciplinarian or a stranger in the office that no one ever sees–she’s a part of our community and we LOVE to have her visit. 🙂

Ok, Mrs. Sisul–what will you bring us next?? (Please don’t make us wait until November for the next Mother Bruce book!! 🙂 )

No Voice Day!

Today was kind of tricky. I have an unfortunate beginning-of-the-year-my-kids-got-me-sick cold, and it’s taken my voice. 😦 Luckily my throat doesn’t hurt (no, I don’t have strep–don’t worry, friends!), but it’s hard to not talk when you’re a teacher. LOL The hardest thing–especially when we’re in the midst of a #classroombookaday challenge–is the read alouds. I couldn’t NOT read aloud today (especially when there are texts that go with subjects as well as the ones just for fun), so I figured we’d “read” them on YouTube instead. I know it’s not really rocket science, but it’s the first time I’d done it, so I was kind of excited about it.

Today was a 3-book day, and two of them were videos. We started the day with How Full is Your Bucket? for Kids, which is one that kiddos know from kindergarten. It’s a great story, and is a super book to use with kids anyway, but this one was chosen also because we’ve been having some empty buckets at the end of the day lately. 😦 Everyone needed a reminder. 🙂

Check it out, in case you haven’t ever read it (or even if you have!):

Another one we “read” like this was The Night of the Veggie Monster which is a mentor text for our Small Moments writing unit we’re starting. It’s so funny and is a story every kid can relate to personally.

Kiddos were so excited about this kind of read aloud that I might start to incorporate it more frequently just as a change of pace. 🙂

I’m wondering…

Kids: What did you like best about these stories today?

Parents: What did your learner tell you about our #classroombookaday choices today?

Teachers: How do you use videos for read aloud? What suggestions do you have?

Thanks for sharing your voice!

20somethingkids and 1kookyteacher

Starting a 3rd Grade Journey

Category Archives: Reading