Monday, September 2, 2013

Names + All About Me

Our first full week was challenging, but successful!  Getting accustomed to the classroom rules and procedures is always the toughest part, but by Friday I felt like we were well on our way.  As we sail into our second week, I'm hoping "clipping down" becomes less popular and "clipping up" becomes the new trend.

We finished up our Name Unit on Friday and I was so impressed by how quickly the kids learned each other's names.  We even scrambled up the letters in our names to see if we could recognize each one - and the kids got every single name right!

I always start this unit off by reading the book Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes.


Not only is this a great book to introduce names, but it also teaches a great lesson about being kind to our friends.  We talked about how being different is ok and that we should all be proud of who we are no matter what people say.

In the book, Chrysanthemum is teased for having such a long name - 13 letters to be exact.  I always like to point out that it's actually quite impressive to have a long name and be able to spell it correctly!

We put together our own Class Name Graph to see how many letters we each had in our names.

Looks like our number one is falling off - oops.


We concluded that Elizabeth had the most letters (9) and we had a four way tie for the least number of letters - Eden (4), Ella (4), Tate (4) and Cole (4).

In addition to our graph, we also did Rainbow Writing with our friend's names as well as Play Doh names!








We finished up our All About Me books on Friday and they are FABULOUS!  Once again, the kids completely exceeded my expectations.  They are now proudly hanging on our bulletin board outside of of our classroom.














We are in the beginning stages of Writer's Workshop and Daily Five.  You will be hearing more about these structures as the year progresses.

One very important component of Writer's Workshop is sharing.  I allowed everyone to share their writing this week to get an idea of what it is like and to hopefully get over any fears of speaking in front of the class.  I was surprised to see that most everyone seemed comfortable.   In fact, they were eager to be the next one to share.






The Daily Five is the structure I use in my class that helps the students develop the daily habits of reading, writing and working independently.  It consists of five centers - read to self, read to someone, listen to reading, word work and work on writing.

This week we discussed the three ways to read a book.


I modeled how to read the pictures in a book.  I then used the same book and read the words.  The kids realized that they could gain a similar understanding of the book by just reading the pictures - therefore, they can READ even though they can't read the words.

They were also surprised when they realized they could retell the story that we had just read - therefore, once again, they can READ!

To encourage reading and picking books of interest, I had the kids highlight five books in their Scholastic Readers that they would like to read.  Just by giving them the power of choice, they immediately demonstrated a love of reading.  This is our ultimate goal!





I hope everyone had a wonderful, long weekend!  See y'all tomorrow!

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