Falling in love

We had a great day at school  full of my favorite things, reading and writing! I know I have said it before, but I cannot say enough how much I enjoy watching a new class fall in love with reading every year. Of course there are always those precious students that walk through my door with an innate love of reading.  How I would love to take credit for their abilities in reading and writing, but that would not be quite fair now would it? They would LOVE reading regardless; even as I stand to profess the joy and wonder of all things literacy to those around them. It is like preaching to the choir with these chosen few. One of these days I expect an Amen sister, or an Hallelujah! I sometimes look at them as sweet old souls with the same loves as me. I want to enlist them in my private campaign to transform my classroom into a reading haven. 


I must profess that what I have found so exciting this year, after reading The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller, is that it REALLY is possible to create that very haven in which students walk in ready, and not just willing, but eager to open their books and dive right in! Is it premature of me, here in the first month of school, to hope that the quiet moments of Reading Workshop, that I so enjoy watching and participating in, endure the year! I hope not!



Our "Writer's Eyes" were a smashing success yesterday! I am so proud of my little writers...here are some examples!

       

Again, as stated in a previous post, this project will lead us closer to creating the perfect narrative piece.  Just one more resource to pull amazing ideas from!

In the next few weeks, most of the mentor texts that I share will help with sensory detail and figurative language. These small daily pages and details we add to our Writer's Notebooks will be just be one more tool to help us plan and write that amazing narrative story. Revisited throughout these few weeks will be The Boy Who Loved Words by Roni Schotter and Max's Words by Kate Banks. Both of these selections will add purposeful and detailed vocabulary to our pieces. Such fun vocab! 

  

A Long Way from Chicago is still pulling them in every afternoon. One sweet boy came and parked himself directly in front of me exclaiming how close he wanted to be because he LOVES this book! You CANNOT beat that! We really focused on visualization and character today as we read my favorite chapter of the book. We anchored and discussed some of our favorite things about character and Grandma Dowdel.

We have not read this next story together, and I am not sure that we will. So I wanted to add something that we did as a group last year with the fun and realistic characters of Tales From a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume.

Well the hour grows late, and I should head to my bedroom as it calls me. I am sure I will spend a considerable amount of time at school tomorrow as I get ready for the next week and as I continue to get caught up on responding to Reader's Notebooks. It is so (here I want to add about a million o's to "so" because one does not seem to express exactly how "so" I mean hehe) easy to get behind in responses, but I can honestly say that again, yes again, I am very proud of my kiddos letters to me.

  

I am super sad; however, that I did not get to watch more of Justin's game as I would have liked. Mother Nature had other intentions in mind here at the beginning of the season when thunderstorms and lightning rolled through. No worries though, I am sure I will have plenty more time to watch him ~ it just goes by so fast!

#3 Justin Dunn

Headed off to that room now...Happy Reading! 

Writer's Eye and Reader's Cafe

Today was the first day this year for me to be away from my sweet kiddos. I spent my day in Common Core  training, secretly wishing I was in my classroom reading and writing with my kids. I am anxious to see how my first day with a substitute went. 

While I was out, I left a fun writing activity for my kiddos. I cannot wait to see their finished products! Before hand, I created my "Writer's Eye" (I) as explained by Jeff Anderson in Mechanically Inclined. (I also have seen it on Julie Ballew's amazing website A Literate Life.) This will be one more resource for them to use as begin working our way to writing our narratives. As we have launched into writing, we have spent many hours talking about where writers get their ideas! Using our writer's eye to look closely at ourselves is a perfect way to gather the ideas that just may lead to that perfect story. 

Yesterday, we revisited Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street by Roni Schotter.  We discussed how the character Eva had to really be observant to help her become a better writer! Sometimes it is the little things around us that can make the best story. Another great example of using observation in our writing is Twilight Comes Twice by Ralph Fletcher. LOVE, love me some Ralph Fletcher! Such an amazing writer and teacher of writing! I share so many of his ideas every year!

I am really looking forward to the coming weeks as we focus on sensory detail and figurative language. So many great mentor texts ahead of us as we continue adding ideas and strategies to our notebooks. 

OK...so I know I am a little late in the game, but I have finally started my Reading Cafe board. It is not exactly where I would prefer it, but with limited space, I am glad to have it up at all. :) With hardly any wall space in my room, I tend to take over the hallways...

Well, ready to call it a night! Off to steal pin a few more ideas from Pinterest as I drift off to sleep.

Happy Reading!

More Hopes, Dreams...and peace, love, and harmony ;)

Just a real quick post tonight to show off the hopes and dreams of Mrs. Whitt's class, the wonderful teacher I share students with! She has made the cutest display of their thoughts regarding their goals for the year - their hopes and dreams. How encouraging to see this bright and hopeful board every day. I just LOVE it!   ~ "I hope I will make lots of new friends and have a great year." ~"My hope and dreams are that I get better in writing." ~ "My hope and dream is that everyone gets a chance to fill buckets." ~ "I hope we all become friends!"

So sweet! She claims it was a happy surprise at how wonderfully it all turned out, but I'm not sure I am buying it, wink wink!

  

While I am here, one or two quick picture books for the day. :)

 

Amazing Grace by Mary Hoffman and The Curious Garden by Peter Brown are both wonderful little examples of working hard to achieve your hopes and dreams. Not only is it important for us to verbalize our hopes and dreams or set goals, it is just as important for us to work hard for them!

Happy Reading!

Time warps and notebooks

OK...so being a three day weekend and all, I spent a little extra time in my classroom Sunday trying to catch up on the stacks that seem to rotate around my desk. It was during this effort that an all too familiar phenomenon occurred. I swear to you that when I walk into my classroom on the weekend, I am walking through some crazy time warp. I get to planning, gathering ideas, making copies, rotating book baskets, or about a million other things and the phone rings. It is usually my hubby asking how much longer I will be, and it is then that I notice that I have been there for almost 12 hours...yes, I said 12 hours. Though that is not even the kicker; the sad part is that I could easily stay there yet another 12 hours and have plenty to occupy my time. Who does that? Someone walking through a time warp I tell you! 

All silliness aside, I am proud of our productive and hard working little class! Our writer's notebooks are well on the way to holding a ton of ideas for our writing! Our first goal is to capture as many of those ideas as we can, but our most important goal is to fall in love with our writer's notebooks!

We have found so many different ideas we can add!

 

In looking at how the small details of our life can end up as a great story, there are a number of great texts to share. Amelia's Notebook by Marissa Moss is a perfect example of everyday moments and observations creating such a personal story. I love how lighthearted and fun Amelia is even as her thoughts and ramblings fill the margins of her notebook. 

  

Is There Really a Human Race and Where Do Balloons Go? both by Jamie Lee Curtis and illustrated by Laura Cornell are easy examples of  how silly questions and "fierce wonderings" can trigger their own stories. I am a huge fan of this team, and I use most of there stories as mentors at one point or another. I love this clip where Jamie Lee Curtis shares how she came up with the idea for Where Do Balloons Go? and how quickly she wanted to write her story. Ideas can come to us in the craziest ways!

Our next step is to take our wonderful ideas and thoughts through the writing process, from life-to-notebook-to-draft! We will spend a few more weeks gathering ideas and daily pages before we launch into writing our first narrative this year. 

Our thoughts concerning A Writer's Notebook
have really grown in these last two weeks!

In the early days my writing workshop, my big push in selecting read alouds focuses on "why writers write" and "where they get their ideas." Two great books that I have not shared with you yet are My Mama Had a Dancing Heart by Libba Gray and My Rotten Red Headed Older Brother by Patricia Polacco. Mama's dancing heart is such a lyrical beautifully illustrated story that you cannot help but to love it. Rual Colon did an amazing job on the illustrations, and the language of the story is just as moving as we see a daughter's memory of her mother move through the seasons, and her life, and her story. You honestly cannot go wrong with a Polacco book. I can use just about any of her books to share digging deep and adding more of "you" to your story. 

 

Taking a moment to share how each story adds
to what we know about writing...

Did I mention we have had a very productive two weeks? I am tired just thinking about all we have done! Our morning meetings have been so much fun! Watching kids "Go Bananas" and survive "Shark Attack" make me giggle and would be perfect other than I walk around singing them in my head all day. Go bananas, go go bananas.... (I shall now be singing this song until I go to bed.  hmmm) Here are a couple of our morning messages.

One of our "for fun read alouds" is a fave of mine. No really, more than most haha. This playful story, Memoirs of a Goldfish by Devin Scillian, starts off simple enough: "Day One I swam around my bowl. Day Two I swam around my bowl. Twice." However, before you know it Goldfish's simple life is filled with a number of challenging characters and it is more than he can handle. In the end, Goldfish learns how much he loves his new "family." I like to think of my classroom as our own little family, full of many of its own challenging um... interesting characters!

 

Kids are getting ready to start sharing their Reading Response letters with me. Lots of practice (and a little "cheat-sheet" which brought out tons of "you're the best teacher ever") have prepared most students to turn in their response notebooks on the appropriate day. I glanced at many last week as students eagerly shared what they had so far. This is a new step for some of these kiddos, and I think it may be a while before I am seeing the quality I expect. 

I am very proud of how much reading stamina and joy in reading my students are showing. This is the first year for me to use my little "book worm" as a drawing for a book prize. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but as students complete a chapter book, they fill out a completion form and drop it in our book worm jar. (Students must have also had this book entered on the reading log in their binders and have responded about this book in their reader's notebooks on a dated page.) Just look at all these entries so far! 

Alright, here is the familiar song and dance; I think that catches me up on my goal for a picture book-a-day. I am thinking about making a page just to pull out each book, so I can really see where I am at. Guess we will see!

Happy Reading!