Whew! This was a BUSY week! We had a day off with Election Day, but then came back and hit the ground running with Veterans’ Day on Friday and our program. We were really excited about continuing our work with shapes, non-fiction (both in Reading and Writing), as well as some author work with Lauren Castillo as we finished up the Global Read Aloud. So…that meant that we got 19 books read in 4 days, and we also hit a TREMENDOUS milestone: we passed 200 books!!
First the update of what the door looks like now:
WOWZA! Look at all those books! (And yes, I did have to fudge that last strip of pictures–didn’t get them on before I left on Friday!)
We are up to 208 now, and reached 200 with this book on Thursday:
We put a star on it, just like when we got to 100. 🙂
This week we read 3 or 4 non-fiction books to help us with our reading and writing work, 5 shape books to go along with our math investigations, 2 books about the sun (the focus in our Science unit right now), and a couple of additional texts by some authors we love but haven’t read yet: The Happiest Book Ever by Bob Shea (we started Wednesday morning with this one!), King Baby by Kate Beaton (we read this one twice because it was so good!), Cat the Cat Who is That? and Nanette’s Baguette by Mo Willems (all those -et words!!), and Happy Like Soccer by Maribeth Boelts and Lauren Castillo. Lastly, we ended the week with a Veterans’ Day tribute as Mrs. Meihaus read America’s White Table to us during our Library visit.
As I always say, I’m excited to see what this next week will bring us (I think there are at least 6 books on the plan for tomorrow already!), and am SO GLAD we are doing this challenge. Someday soon I plan on having some big-deal math around the work we’ve done here so far, as well as predictions for where we might go. Can’t wait to share! 🙂
SO excited to update again with some more great books we’ve been reading! We’re up to 188 books (what?? How is that possible?), AND we’re about to fill up our door! I wrote previously about how I think this challenge has changed both me and my students as readers, and that continues to ring true. SO glad I caught the book-a-day bug and excited to keep scratching the itch to read!!
Check out how we’re doing:
This week we read 17 books (starting w/ Yard Sale by Eve Bunting and Lauren Castillo).
Our Global Read Aloud text was Yard Sale, which we loved, and will probably revisit again next week because it’s so good! We also read a couple of non-fiction texts as part of our study in reading and writing, learning how to teach our writers as well as how to really dig into a teaching text as a reader. We found a couple of Halloween stories we has missed last week and read them on actual Halloween on Monday. The Spiderman book, the two “underpants” titles and The Ninjabread Man were requests from kiddos. I found Gilbert Goldfish and Everyone Loves Cupcake at the library and go them because they were an author we had read during our election reading. They are both by Kelly DiPucchio and we discovered she has so many great books to enjoy! The last two on our list were also because of author-love: Lori Degman wrote Norbert’s Big Dream and our friends in Rm. 203 shared it with us because they are having a Skype with her later this year, and Dirk Yeller is a favorite of mine from our friend Mary Casanova. We also read Curious George Gets a Talker as part of our focus on Disabilities Awareness Month (I hope to share more about this in a later post 🙂 ).
I mentioned that we had been doing some election reading, which is partly because of the election our parents are participating in on Tuesday, but also be WE get to vote as part of Kids Voting on Monday! We will elect the President at our school, and we will also vote on our Literary Lanterns! WOOHOO–democracy in action. 🙂 First I shared Vote For Me!, which was a great example of how NOT to encourage someone to vote for you–mudslinging and lots of “vote for me because I’m pretty” and “vote for me because I’m awesome” and “vote for me because I’ll give you something” kinds of reasons. We had a great conversation about how this was unfortunately how much of our Presidential election has been going this season. 😦 Next we read Grace For President, and got a much better example of how to handle an election. Grace, the main character in the story, wants to run for President after seeing a poster of all the past presidents and saying, “Where are all the girls?” This text had a great, kid-friendly example of how the electoral college works, too, which was a great surprise. After this one, I asked kiddos what they thought was important in a President. They had some great ideas; I wonder if this is what we will give them on Election Day:
Rm. 202 kids said things like: nice, polite, trustworthy, someone who cares for us, who will protect us, fair, someone who works hard, who is brave and of course, someone who is 35 years old or older–LOL
Lastly, we read the book If Kids Ran the World, which was another great example of what is really important in this world and is a challenge to all of the adults to think about the big things. Are we giving our kids what they really need? Are we focused on the right things? We didn’t get to it, but I will ask Rm. 202 kids this question: If YOU ran the world, what would you do? What would you think was important? Can’t wait to see what they say. 🙂
This was another great week of reading in Rm. 202!! What will this next week bring? Please check in next week to find out!! 🙂
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. 🙂
A few weeks ago I started seeing tweets about Literary Lanterns and they were so interesting to me. Basically think of a pumpkin painted like your favorite book character, and that’s what they are. We toyed with the idea of doing this on a school level, but it didn’t happen, so Rm. 202 decided to do it for ourselves!
First I showed my friends some examples of some pumpkins other kids had created, since I figured most of them didn’t really didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. 🙂
Then we brainstormed a list of characters kiddos would like to create, with two minor rules: NO ONE could do Piggie or Elephant and NO ONE could do the Pigeon, because well, EVERYONE would want to do those characters and that would be a very boring pumpkin display. Once everyone was clear on those guidelines (which really meant that EVERY OTHER BOOK CHARACTER in the world was fair game), kiddos got busy creating a list of ideas.
I pulled up our book pictures on our ActivBoard, and many also studied our door display (see? Another reason why this project has been SO GREAT!).
Originally I was going to take our ideas and make a list and then have everyone pick the one they wanted, but instead had them circle the one they most wanted to create on the list they first brainstormed. Then I just had to cross-reference everyone’s choice (which was much easier and much less work!) and surprisingly it all worked out really nicely. Some kiddos were paired up (if they chose the same book) and some worked alone.
These choices were made on a Friday, so that kiddos could then work at home over the weekend to secure their pumpkin and any other supplies they might need. To my surprise and delight, this showed up on Monday:
Once we had our pumpkins, our plans and some time, we got busy!!
Oh my goodness they looked great!
Then we had a super idea about how we’d share them with our Robinson friends. I asked Mrs. Meihaus if she would let us make a display of them in the library so we could show up our hard work and creativity, and she so kindly said YES! Most teachers at Robinson know about our #classroombookaday challenge and how this went along with our crazy reading love, so were interested in what we were doing anyway.
Then we had another great idea: we would use this project as the basis of our learning on elections and voting. Our display was set up, we created a sign to hang above our pumpkins and then everyone of them was numbered. I created a Google form for Robinson friends, family and teachers (anyone who views the display, really) to cast their votes and now we’re off! We are so proud and very excited to see what happens with this project now that it’s in place in the library. 🙂
And without further ado, here are our final products:
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We’d love to include you in our voting, too! If you’d like to vote for YOUR favorite pumpkin, scan the QR code or click on the link below and cast your vote! We’d LOVE to see how far this project can spread outside of our walls in Missouri, so please also share where you live! THANK YOU in advance!!
This week during our visit to the library learning commons with Mrs. Meihaus, we had a lesson on how to find things in the library.
She taught us how to find things in the library, using call numbers. We learned the difference between FIC books (chapter books), E books (everybody picture books), and books that have PB in front of the FIC and E (which means that they are paperback). We also learned (or were reminded) that nonfiction books have numbers along with the first three letters of the author’s last name.
Then, she had us create our own call numbers–because we are all authors, after all! Some kiddos had blue cards that were for FIC books and yellow cards that meant we were E book authors. Kiddos wrote their call number on the sheet.
Then, we created HUMAN BOOKSHELVES, ordering ourselves based on our names on the shelf. This was really tricky, but since we are Roadrunners, and show our GRIT all the time, we did it!
This was a short week at school (we only had Weds-Fri), so our list is a little smaller than other weeks. But believe me it is no less amazing! (Oh, and by the way, I realized that picture looks like we’re a little closer to filling up our door than we actually are….still a couple more weeks away. 🙂 ).
Here’s the close up of the week (which I realized I don’t usually share):
This week we started with another Mo Willems title we hadn’t read, as well as a Kate Klise book that kiddos read last year before she came to visit. On Thursday we were lucky to have Mrs. Sisul swing by with her brand-spanking new copy of Hotel Bruce, which she had promised to read to us when she came with Mother Bruce earlier this year. She had a great story about how she had gotten her copy from her favorite local bookstore and had also celebrated Bruce’s book birthday last Tuesday. We read two Pigeon books for our punctuation study, and The Reader for the Global Read Aloud this week. Two of our books were recommendations from our friend Rachel, and then lastly we were lucky to have a familiar 4th grade friend come and read to us on Friday. Remember when Allie came to read Naked to us? Well, during that visit they had asked if Riley could come, too, and Friday he finally came! His grade was having a whole day reading celebration and so he spent some of his time reading Mustache Baby Meets His Match to us. We LOVED it!
Another successful reading week! Our count is up to 161 so far, which is SO AMAZING! Can’t wait to see what this coming week holds! 🙂
Another week, another list of great read alouds! For some reason we only read 12 (instead of the almost 20 from most weeks so far), but boy were they good ones and man did we have fun! Here’s what our door looks like as of Friday:
Let me tell you about a few of the highlights from this week:
We added 3 Piggie and Elephant titles to our door, which we LOVE!!
We read another Peter Brown book ( well, 2 of them actually), and we’re becoming fans of another great author. We loved My Teacher is a Monster and noticed lots of great things happening in the illustrations. Then we shared The Curious Garden and LOVED it! And we found The Curious Garden because we’d seen the amazingly beautiful song by Emily Arrow on her YouTube channel. What a great partnership between music and literature!And speaking of The Curious Garden, we had great conversations about grit and growth mindset from that little city garden and the boy who helped it grow!
We added some Olivier Dunrea titles to our list, too, which we found after we first read Ollie the Stomper for shared reading early in the year. Since the first one, we’ve met Gideon, his octopus buddy Otto and a perfect pair of friends named Jasper and Joop. This coming week there’s more on the list to explore!
Another Ame Dyckman title was enjoyed this week– Wolfie the Bunny!
We read our first title for the Global Read Aloud this week and interacted with Nana in the City by Lauren Castillo. We drew and wrote about how we could be brave in our capes. We’re excited for next week’s book–The Troublemaker!
Lastly, we had a really special mystery reader come to our class and share a funny book with us called Naked by Michael Ian Black–Allison Bearden! Do you recognize that name? It’s my cutie-pie kindergarten daughter! She had been reading and rereading Naked, practicing sounding like a storyteller, and I asked her if she wanted to read it to my first graders. She was excited about that idea, and when she showed up, my kiddos were, too!
They were great listeners, Allie was a great reader and Rm. 202 kids were impressed that she could read the words in that book! The next request was that Riley Bearden come down from 4th grade and share a book with them. He’s ready to take on that challenge, so maybe he’ll be here next week on the 20somethingkids blog!
Another great week of reading, inspiring, thinking and book-loving in Rm. 202! Thanks for reading! Do you have a suggestion of a book we could read? We LOVE recommendations from other readers!
Last year I learned about the Global Read Aloud from a Twitter friend of mine named Tam Scharf who lives in Australia. She is a great collaborator and friend to me, despite the fact that we have never really met, have only spoken in person once (well really it was over Skype), and don’t even live on the same continent or teach the same grade (anymore at least–we both taught 5th grade we first “met” in 2011). I love that that story actually describes many teachers who are important parts of my professional learning network.
But anyway….the Global Read Aloud 2016 started this week and we are off to a running start already! We began with a short introduction to what it is,
who we would be studying and what they could look forward to doing over the next 6 weeks. We watched a video and checked out the website of Lauren Castillo, the author and illustrator we’d be studying. Very shortly they were hooked and SUPER excited to join the almost 900,000 kids who would be studying the same books!
This week’s book (as you can see in the video) is Nana in the City, and is all about bravery. After we read and discussed the story, we got busy answering this question:
We got busy thinking and drawing and I was really impressed (and a little surprised) with what they came up with. Check out our work!
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We are excited to read more and write more and share our thinking! There are some other friends in our school who are also participating and we’re hoping to share our thinking with them, as well. Tomorrow we plan on joining a Twitter chat about Lauren Castillo’s books, too, so we can talk about what we like, what we think and who we are. We may also build cityscapes to teach others about where we live. The opportunities are endless! I’m excited to share more and we go along!! 🙂
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. 🙂
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!
I feel like I say this every week now, too, but looking at this just makes me happy!
20somethingkids and 1kookyteacher 