Wow–what a great week we had in first grade! I’m excited about both the number of books we were able to read as well as the titles that we were able to experience and learn from together. 🙂
Here’s our wall as of December 1, 2017:
We’ve read 242 books!!
The books we shared this week were on a variety of topics, as we are studying many things and also adding in some extra topics of interest. So this week, we added these 18 books:
Can you tell what we were learning about? I love how when you see the covers all together, you can really tell the intentionality with which they were chosen. The topics and stories were used to help kiddos make connections to what they are learning (and doing), as well as to get them thinking about older topics in new ways.
I haven’t measured, so this is just a guess, but I’d say we’re halfway down that big wall! What amazing work, first grade! Wonder how many we’ll end up with, and even bigger, I wonder how many words we’ve read together in all of those books!?
I think we’re on Week 15. This time of year it seems I lose count. Something about how school weeks with only 2 days gets me all messed up. I’m sure you can relate. 🙂
So…whether it’s week 15 (or some other number), we’re up to 224 books! The wall is filling up so fast and perhaps the best part is that the pictures are about kid-eye-level so it’s even more interactive from here on out! Check it out. 🙂
We’ve been busy reading lots of different kinds of things over the last few weeks, including getting into some non-fiction texts. We’re having some great conversations about whether a book we read are fiction or not (sometimes kids are tricked when there are illustrations instead of or alongside photographs). This happened in a book we read about St. Louis architecture (which WAS non-fiction), as well as one written by local Kirkwood author Dan Killeen (who is visiting us soon!!) that also had real places in St. Louis in it but was about talking dinosaurs, and so therefore was not a teaching book. 🙂
We read an interesting book about Betsy Ross this past week, too, that had us really digging and studying to figure out who the book was about and why they wrote a book about her. Eventually we saw that she had made the first American flag, and there was an interesting detail about how she didn’t like Washington’s suggestion of 6-pointed stars and instead used 5-pointed stars that she could cut out of a square of fabric with just one little snip. And since there was a how-to in the back of the book, we had to try it out!
New additions to the wall are also the context for our newest math investigation–all about a double-decker bus–as well as a book we read for Thanksgiving and some that we just read because they’re good. LOL
I just had another library visit today (and this branch had the most AMAZING automated return system!) and am excited about the new books I got for this upcoming week! Please come back next week to see what our wall looks like then! 🙂
What an exciting week in first grade reading!! We hit 200 books!! We’re in that super fun time of year, too, where the topics we’re reading about are so much fun and we’re in a smooth routine that allows us to read even more than usual. Win-win!!
Check out our wall! Our updated total is 203! (yeah…I just noticed I put on book up there twice. Ignore that part. 🙂 ).
I was talking to my friend the other day about our wall and how happy we are that it’s in a place where EVERYONE in our school walks every day. We did so much with this challenge last year and no one got to see it or share it with us because our room was tucked up in a quiet corner where no one but us ever walked. This way all the readers in our school (adult and student alike!) get to check out what we’re doing. And besides showing all of our hard work, it’s just so PRETTY!! Sometimes I really do just stand there and look at it. Books can inspire you in so many ways!
This week we read lots of great ones by many authors and used them in many ways.
We came back to a few old favorite authors–and illustrators–this week (talking to you, Ryan T. Higgins, Marla Frazee, Mo Willems, Todd Parr, Steve Antony and Mem Fox!). We have worked through SO MANY of those friends’ titles, but still had some floating around that we had to finish up. Mem Fox has SO MANY and we were still working through hers from the Global Read Aloud (which, by the way, I am remembering I have forgotten to tell you about. More on that later, I hope!). We used many of them to help with some word work we have been doing, and some I picked to help revisit a friend/kindness theme (it’s that time of year when you need to remind kiddos that the things we talked about at the beginning of the year are still a thing!). Little i came in SUPER handy as we were working on the editing phase in our writing unit, and Pumpkin Jack is always a nice ending to our Literary Lanterns project and the “pumpkin” focus we had around Halloween.
Kiddos were our readers this week, too, as Celia shared Thank You, Mr. Panda and Campbell read The Thank You Book to us. 🙂
Funny kid reference from the week comes when I was sharing that we were going to read Knuffle Bunny Too and Knuffle Bunny Free. I was happily sharing how we’d read these and Louie says, “Oh, like Knuffle Bunny 2 and 3!” We all had a laugh and I TOTALLY didn’t even hear the titles like that. Good detail, Mo Willems, and good listening, Louie!!
We’re still rolling along, adding books and book and books to our display in the first grade hallway. Check out the latest and greatest:
I know you can tell that we’re almost ready to add another arrow (for 200!), and as of this last week we have logged 186 books! This week was busy and the schedule was a little wonky because of Halloween, a 1/2 day and other events around school, so we only added 10, but they were all good ones!
We had lots of Halloween-themed books, as well as another Lola Schaefer and another book illustrated by our friend Peter H. Reynolds because–why not?? One of the texts was a kid-written story, and then the last one of the week was from my rotation on our 1/2 day, where I taught about the Navy (each teacher shared about a different branch of the military).
What did you read this week? PLEASE recommend something that YOU love to us and we’ll read it, too! 🙂 Until next week–happy reading!
Oh my goodness! Week 11 already?? We’re moving and grooving and totally rocked the book-reading this week! Seemed like they came in pairs this time around; one of our authors has written lots of books that are related to each other so we read them together!
Here’s the current display:
We’re all the way up to 176 now!! Yep, we read 21 books this week! Told you we rocked it! 🙂
Here are the new ones. 🙂
See what I mean about pairs of books? We had 4 sets of books from Sandra Boynton and Lola Schaefer (she seemed to do it so many times it HAD to be on purpose! Ms. Schaefer, if you read this, please tell us if it is!!). There were a couple of kid-readers this week, too, as Celia read a book SHE WROTE to us called Donut, and Natalie read us Doggies and Blue Hat, Green Hat after working on them for a while to get them ready to share with her classmates! Also, we read Mystery Vine, by the same author as our old favorite David’s Drawings, Cathryn Falwell. Man, I love it when we can revisit old friends. 🙂
Now, you know that RM. 111 and 112 love reading no matter what, and that we love all books and all readers, but I also know you know that there is not much better than when MRS. SISUL READS TO US!! Again, you’re probably not surprised at all that she came back this week to read. And that she was on ROLLER SKATES!! Man, Robinson is a super amazing place to learn and read! 🙂
What did you read this week? What pairs of books have you tried? Share with us!! 🙂
Somehow, even though we only had 3 days of school this week, we read more books than all of last week. Maybe because I wasn’t happy with the fact that we only read 10 and we had to catch up a little? Who knows, but we were busy readers and added some great titles over the last few days. Here’s our wall as of October 20. We’re up to 155 now!!
This week’s books were varied and fun. Check them out!
See those Mem Fox books? Yep–Global Read Aloud is still rocking and rolling! We are beginning a pumpkin project in reading so had to read those two books about pumpkins, and some were just for fun!
Mrs. Sisul came by on Friday to share Monster Trouble with us, and you know Principal Read Alouds are always a big hit!
This one was so great and we were all surprised with how the little girl tricked the monsters with KISSES!!
What would you like to see us read? What recommendations do you have for us that you have read lately or that you just really love? We’d love to hear about books we don’t know about yet. 🙂
Well, those predictions and pictures weren’t the only things we did! As in the story, we created our own version of the Olympics, but made the Robinson Olympics and created animals that we would see in our own “bush” that could cheer on Koala Lou. We worked with our “pincher” fingers to create our animals, rather than scissors. Ms. Turken created a fabulous tree for our Koala Lou to climb, and two friends also created a sign. We were pretty proud, and hung our Olympics in our hall for all to see.
As we went through the week, however, I kept looking at our FABULOUS display thinking something was missing. Those animals down there, who were supposed to be cheering on their friend Koala Lou, weren’t saying anything! Also, we didn’t have a sign and so really only we knew what the mural was for but no one else who walked by and saw it knew what our creation was about.
So…we worked another morning to add speech bubbles to our animal friends. We worked in partners to make sure our work was first grade perfect and that others could read what we were saying. Our friends helped us make sure we used the word wall, put in all the sounds and had the correct punctuation before we “published” our final bubbles for the wall.
And so now when you walk down our hallway–which is a pretty great location for sharing what’s going on, by the way!–you can tell exactly what’s going on and what the mural is for. And so that way you can more greatly appreciate all the hard work that these first graders have done! Way to go, Rm. 111 and 112 friends!
We ended our first quarter this week, and also our first chunk of fun in our #classroombookaday challenge. We ended up with 142 books in our first 9 weeks together and WOW were there some good ones! Here’s our wall as of October 13:
We must have been busy doing lots of other things (including end-of-unit assessments I guess), and only read 10 books this week. Here are the highlights:
We were in Week 2 of the Global Read Aloud this week, and so Possum Magic was on the top of our list. 🙂 We also added in This and That and also Particular Cow by Mem Fox. As we like to do, we added in more books by authors we already know, and so we read My Teacher is a Monster by Peter Brown and The Incredible Book Eating Boy by Oliver Jeffers.
As we were studying light and sound in science, we read The Energy We See. This week was disABILITIES awareness week in our school, so we read Aneil Has a Food Allergy, as we talked about physical disabilities on Thursday. The Amazing Autumn book was just for some fall fun, as was the book When I Was Five. Lastly, we added another Show-Me Award nominee to our list, and read Fur, Fins and Feathers: Abraham Dee Bartlett and the Invention of the Modern Zoo.
Whew! That list makes me a little tired and a lot happy! Here’s to adding even more to the wall this week as we start a new quarter of reading and learning together!
And just because I’m always thinking about numbers (and reading, too) I figured out 142 X 4 quarters means we’ll be at 568 (or so) and that beats last year’s number!! Here’s to continuing to share amazing books with amazing kids!
What a SUPER week for reading in first grade! Ok, well it’s always great, but when we’re doing #classroombookaday AND the Global Read Aloud at the same time, it’s extra magical. 🙂
Our count is up to 132 and here’s what our wall looks like:
Isn’t it beautiful? I mean, really?! I could stand there and study it all day long–and I’m sure many Robinson kids could (and would!), too, if we’d let them. 🙂
This week we read these books:
As I have written briefly about (and even mentioned here!), we started the Global Read Aloud this week, and have loved beginning our study of Australian culture and Mem Fox’s books. Along with the “assigned” GRA books, we have also added in a nonfiction book about koalas (to help us understand Koala Lou), as well as two other Mem Fox stories. We ended our week on a sweet note as we read about how Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge shared memories with Ms. Nancy and helped her remember. 🙂
As is usual in my classroom, we added in some beloved authors’ books to add to the collection. This week it was another Todd Parr book (yep–there are still some we haven’t read yet!) and another Ame Dyckman, because well, she’s awesome and why not? I also shared King Baby by Kate Beaton this week because we had also read The Princess and the Pony earlier this year. That one got lots of laughs. 🙂
Ok…and now let me tell you a story about some books we didn’t love. In some ways I feel bad about writing this. Feel like we’re supposed to just read “good” books, so to speak, and/or find something that I like in every text we read. But then again, reading is personal and everyone likes different things, right? It might have just been that the timing of when we read them was not ideal. One afternoon this week I had a “we-just-need-to-sit-down-and-enjoy-a-book-together” moment, after a really rough morning. I explained how reading with people I love, experiencing a good book together makes me feel better. And then….we read Pig the Pug. And Pig the Winner. And, oh my goodness…no one felt any better! The looks on the faces of some of my friends was priceless as we read about how greedy and mean and inappropriate Pig’s choices were. He would NOT make a very good Roadrunner and his books were FULL of unexpected behaviors. Ok, so at least we learned some things we should NOT do. There–I found something positive to say. 🙂 Oh, and we didn’t add it to the wall yet (because Ms. Turken hasn’t read it), but we then had to read The Grandma Book (by Todd Parr) and How to Find a Fox (both very funny) to make up for those first two. Then we could move on. 🙂
We read Jabari Jumps this week and enjoyed finding parts that we could relate to, as well as encouraging him on as he tried something that he was scared to do. I was so happy as my friends were telling him, “No, don’t stop now!” and how we could discuss positive self-talk that we can use when we’re nervous about something new.
Only One You and Animalogies were both used as prompts for learning activities–one with Mrs. Berger and another for an art project that we’re doing for a school celebration in a couple of weeks. We read Even Superheros Have Bad Days. We were a little worried–after those yucky books the day before–and because the title seemed to signal bad news. BUT, we read this one and LOVED it! It was a perfect connection to another book we have read, We Can Get Along. It had some SUPER examples about how superheroes COULD do some pretty terrible things when they’re upset, but then INSTEAD they could also choose to respond in more appropriate, expected ways. This book ended up being EXACTLY what Roadrunners do–use breathing strategies and Peace Places and other things to help them get back to center. Whew!
And then there’s One Day in the Eucalyptus, Eucalyptus Tree… I read this one last year, and I know it’s great, but this year it was perhaps an even greater read, because Mrs. Sisul came to share it with us as her principal read aloud. She was very excited about it, and her love of both the book and reading to kids showed. And this made us love it even more!
I didn’t get a recording of the whole thing, but I had to get at least a little so you could hear what it sounded like. 🙂
See? Told you it was good. 🙂 Oh, I forgot to tell you, but first graders made some predictions about what kind of book she’d bring with her to share with us, and we predicted something by Todd Parr or Mem Fox because that’s who we’re studying. Good guesses, first grade. 🙂
I think it was two years ago when I first officially joined the Global Read Aloud. We were reading The Year of Billy Miller that year and I was teaching 2nd grade. I was invited by my Tweep Tam in Australia and was excited to collaborate worldwide with other kids and teachers reading the same text. Then last year, as I returned to 1st grade, I brought Ms. Turken along for the ride and had an even more amazing journey exploring and responding to Lauren Castillo books!
As we moved into this fall, excitement was high to join this project again, and THE DAY IS FINALLY HERE! We are so jazzed to be studying Mem Fox (and old, familiar favorite author!) and sharing our learning along the way. We will for sure use Seesaw to show our friends and family our thinking, but also hope to collaborate with other kids via Skype, too.
We started with a short video about Mem Fox, and some wondering about both her life and Australia, where she lives. Then, I shared a book I had written when I was teaching 2nd grade (as a mentor text during a culture study we were doing in Social Studies). It was a little indulgent–I got to have a Peter Reynolds moment and say “Australian Culture, by ME!”–but also helped give kids some background on Australia before we read.
Kiddos wrote and drew about what they learned and uploaded their thinking to their Seesaw journals.
Today we came back, ready to hear Koala Lou (the first week’s book), but instead we first teased kiddos with a habit that we’ve learned that good readers do–take a sneak peek. We studied the front and back covers and kiddos made predictions about what they thought the story might be about. They did a pretty good job of guessing some things that actually happened in the story. Again, these were uploaded into Seesaw so we could share our learning. 🙂
Then…finally, last thing today, IT WAS TIME to finally hear the story! We gathered in Rm. 112 and it sounded something like this:
We are SO EXCITED to see what comes next! Art maybe? Have any suggestions for us? 🙂
Australian Culture Book
20somethingkids and 1kookyteacher 