Every student has finally read us his/her Nonfiction Teaching Book!
We are hard at work on our Opinion Writing Unit. After choosing one item from a beachcomber collection, children wrote their first opinion piece.
Then I showed them a piece of writing done by a first grader and a checklist showing them everything we will learn to make our writing better-a road map of sorts. We made a list of things this first grader did that we have not done YET. Then they had a chance to go back and add to their pieces.
Here are some examples...
These writers added more details:
These writers made a comparison:
Now that we have seen what we will learn, we looked at another collection-of horses this time
We made a list of the things we could judge all the horses by:
color
size
mane color
body position
hoof color
Then they chose one and practiced telling their writing partner all the reasons why this horse is better than the others. Oral rehearsal of their ideas is a crucial step in writing.
The next day we worked only our detailed drawing, labeling the part of the horse that they think makes it better than all the others. Next week, we will work day by day learning the elements that make a piece of opinon writing convincing.
Reading Workshop-putting it all together!
Reading partners shared with the class words that they had to problem solve together by reading it in parts and crashing it all back together!
Reading partners also help each other THINK about their books.
Reading is THINKING!
These two readers reminded us all the work that reading partners do while the rest of the class watched. They learn best from one another!
We have this new poster up to help us problem solve how to read vowel teams.
In math we are learning about measurement and comparing numbers by learning about heights of different penguins.
We celebrated another January birthday!
Read alouds...
and our new chapter book read aloud:
