What We're Reading!

Each month for our interactive read aloud I focus on different comprehension skills which may include activating our schema or prior knowledge,  making connections, asking questions, making predictions, making inferences, analyzing characters or story elements, etc.  For the month of January we have been reading the Froggy series and as we get to know Froggy, we make predictions on what we expect Froggy to do... be clumsy, be forgetful, get himself into embarrassing situations, and be funny!  The class sure loves Froggy!  This is truly one of my favorite times of the day when we all gather together and anxiously wait to see what Froggy will get into next!  I highly recommend checking out this series by Jonathan London!

Thank You Mo Willems!

Back on our Piggie and Elephant Day the class wrote Mo Willems a letter asking one of our favorite authors a few questions.  We were so excited when a letter arrived for us this week with the Pigeon and Knuffle Bunny on the envelope!  Thank you Mo Willems for the autographed poster, letter, and postcard!  You made our day!

Thank You Booster Club!

My class and I want to give a big thank you to the Booster Club for supporting our classroom by providing our students with new CD players in our listen to reading center and with new books for us to add to our classroom library.  I was so excited to set the books out and watch the kids gather around them!  Thank you Booster Club!

Chester books!

One of my absolute favorite things to do is introduce students to new books, authors, series, and characters!  We recently read the Chester series by Melanie Watt.   When the students arrive in the morning, they do their morning jobs and then make a quiet choice for about 5 minutes.  A favorite choice has become meeting on the rug and reading a Chester book with a friend.  Makes me so happy to see kids gather around books and share them!

Piggie and Elephant

Our class has officially fallen for a series of books: Piggie and Elephant!  This wonderful series is written by Mo Willems, and not only are these books perfect for beginning readers, they are also super funny!  The class asked a few weeks ago if we could read every Piggie and Elephant book (I think there are 18 now) and graph our favorite one.  This request has turned into so much more!  We are now planning a Piggie and Elephant party!  We plan to invite in other classes to listen to us read the books and share our own Piggie and Elephant stories that the students have been busy writing.  We are having a blast in first/second grade!

Read to Someone

Today the students learned about "Read to Someone."  After shopping for books yesterday, they couldn't wait to share their findings with a friend!  We learned about sitting side by side and being a good listener to our partner.

Let's Go Shopping!

This week we have been working hard to build our Read to Self stamina.  The students have been looking over at our classroom library just waiting for the opportunity to go pick out their own books for their book boxes.  Today we focused on choosing books about topics that we are interested in.  We will have future lessons on choosing books that are "just right" for us as readers.  They are also showing me that they can't wait to start Read to Someone as with each book that was picked up the students would excitedly run to a friend to say "look what I found!"