This week we continued working on our color unit. Using simple books that are familar to the kids led to a lot of great connections throughout the week. We also took the opportunity to add some reading strategies to our CAFE wall. When we learn a strategy to help us become better readers we add it to our CAFE wall, which is sort of like a reading menu. This stays on the wall all year so the kids can reference it to help them when they are stuck with something in a book. More on this in a minute ....
On Monday we finished up with the color orange by reading New Socks. This simple, yet fun, book was a hit with the kids. We practiced making connections to the story by creating our own version of New Socks. Each student cut out two orange socks, illustrated the rest of the picture, then wrote about what they could do in their new socks. These turned out super cute! I love all the creative interpretations of the chick in the book.
On Tuesday we moved on to the color green and read Go Away Big Green Monster. This is a GREAT book to practice visualizing! Next year I want to do a lesson similar to Harold and the Purple Crayon and have the kids draw what they see as I read. After we read the book I realized that lesson would have been perfect! Oh well, there is always next year. We talked about how the author used adjectives to describe the monster, which helps the reader see in their head what the author was thinking. After reading, the kids each made their own big green monsters (so cute!), and during writing we practiced adding adjectives to our sentences to make our writing descriptive and more exciting!
On Wednesday we looked at the color yellow and read School Bus. I took this opportunity to add a bunch of accuracy strategies to our CAFE board. I find we are always talking about comprehension and strategies we can use to better our understanding of stories, but in whole group we rarely touch on accuracy. Usually that is saved for small guided reading groups. This year I wanted the whole class to have the same background knowledge about each strategy before I ever introduce it in small group and this book was perfect to discuss these. The text is short, with only 1 to 4 words on each page so it was a really easy way to introduce strategies for figuring out how to read unknown words. Here you can see what this looks like:
After we finished the book each of the kids made a page for a class book about school busses. I gave each of them a bus printout that they had to color and glue on a page. Then they had to use the rest of the page to draw where their bus was going as well as complete the sentence, "My school bus is going to ______." I stapled these together and it made our very first class book. I LOVE making class books with the kids each year. It is something fun for them that they helped create which really keeps them engaged in reading.
On Thursday, for the color brown, we read the book Who Took the Farmer's Hat and practiced retelling events in the story. After reading, the kids had to turn their hat into something else, just like in the story. The kids completed the sentence, "My hat is a ______" and illustrated the picture to go with it. We reviewed one of our accuracy strategies from the day before, "Use the picture" and talked about how it is really important to have a good illustration because that is what helps the friends in our class read our page. I am always impressed by how creative the kids can be!
Hard to see, but it says, "my hat is a home for bugs".
"my hat is a ice cream cone"
"my hat is a rocket"
One thing I was most excited about this week was getting started with Daily 5. We spent the last 3 weeks learning about each of the five choices: read to self, read to someone, word work, work on writing, and listen to reading. This week we were finally able to put it all together and do 3 rotations a day. I was SO impressed with my firsties this year! They did such a great job rotating and doing their job at each station. It's nice to have some structure to the daily schedule and I'm excited to be able to start pulling small groups for reading in the coming week!
Next week we will finish up our color unit by doing a variety of activities surrounding ALL the colors. I'm looking forward to rainbow week already!
I love how your school buses were so adventurous!!! Your class is so creative. :)
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