Today, after morning work time and Morning Meeting we learned a new song. Well, it wasn’t new song for most of them, but it was new to learn all of the words, I think. We sang all of the verses of “On Top of Spaghetti.” We also had a small lesson about compound words as we looked at all of the verses.
After our song, we started Reader’s Workshop. Today the mini-lesson was about recognizing “informative texts” as a genre, as well as looking at what the author did in our model text to show emphasis (she made some words bigger in the text and others smaller to show that the moon was getting bigger or smaller). When the kids went off to read, they looked for ways that the authors of their books did the same thing (they noticed CAPTIAL LETTERS, “slanty” letters, different colors, and different sizes). We shared our discoveries at the end-of-workshop share.
After reading, we started Writer’s Workshop. Today we read a couple of books by Donald Crews – Bigmama’s and Shortcut. They are both examples of small moments (what we have been working on). The first is a series of longer events (one summer vacation when he was small), and the second is on episode from that summer, stretched out to a book length. The kids are writing the same way, so many of them tried to zoom in on a smaller moment from one of their larger small moment, like Donald did. We had to delay the end of our writing until after gym – our reading and writing both took longer than we had thought. At the end-of-workshop share, they all talked about how they zoomed in on a small moment.
After writing, we headed down for lunch and recess, and then back up to our room for Author Study – we are still studying Vera B. Williams. The main things on which we are focusing are characters, plot, and connections. Today we read A Chair for Always, and talked about how Vera included the many characters in the story. After that, we headed down to the gym for class with Mr. Hill and Mr. Peterson.
After gym we had Math Workshop – today we finished up the math shape books that we began on Friday. Since we got a bit of a late start on math due to writing, we worked for most for the rest of the afternoon on that. Before we knew it, it was time to clean up and head home!
