Interactive Reading

Today in reading, we read a book in a whole group lesson then split off to discuss the question words of our story. We came back together as a group and these five were team speakers.

Main Idea!

This week we are focusing on the main idea in reading: what the story is mostly about in one-two sentences. 
I Wanna New Room by: Karen Kaufman Orloff
Main Idea: Alex wants a new room to have space from his little brother.  His dad built him his own tree house, but in the end he decided he'd like his brother to join.  
Fish is Fish by: Leo Lionni
Main Idea: The fish and the frog realize that they are different and have to live in different habitats, but they can still be friends. 
Nugget and Fang by: Tammi Sauer/Michael Slack
Main Idea: This story was about a shark, Fang, and a minnow, Nugget, and their friendship.  When Nugget went to school, his minnow friends tried to teach him that sharks are not friends and they are too scary.  Fang ends up saving the school of minnows and they realized not all sharks are bad.
*This is one of Ms. Gegg's most favorite stories!  We had such a good conversation on SO many things from this one book: text-to-text connections, text-to-movie connections, onomatopoeia words, friendship, dialogue/quotation marks, and feelings!  What a fun reading lesson driven by a very engaged Kinder Crew! 

Author/Book Study: Mo Willems

In reading we focused on Mo Willem's Pigeon books. The kids (and I) absolutely love this book! There are so many fun lessons to be incorporated with these. We revisited plot, making inferences and predictions, dialogue, comparing and contrasting and creative writing. These books are a fabulous read for this age to help them with fluency and expression. 

Plot

The plot of the story is made up of the problem, important events, and the resolution.  (Beginning-Middle-End)

Today we read, "Froggy Gets a Doggy"...

First. Froggy wanted a doggy, but his mom decided on a bunny and some other animals.  Then, when they got to the pet store, he saw several different pets, but he made a special connection with a doggy.  In the end, Froggy and his family took the doggy home and Froggy had to learn all the responsibilities of being a pet owner.  

Summarizing!

This week we focused on summarizing. We defined this as: retelling the story in a shorter way, including all the important parts. (Ask them to teach this to you with hand motions.) There is a summarizing sheet coming home to use as a resource at home to help prompt book conversations. Ask them about our read alouds this week!

Summarizing (Done by the whole crew!)

We read the story, The Crocodile Who Didn't Like Water.  The main character was a "crocodile" and his brothers and sisters.  The problem in the story was that the little crocodile didn't like water but his siblings did.  He was tired of feeling lonely so he gave swimming a try.  Then, one day he had a big sneeze, and fire came out!  It turns out that little crocodile was in fact a dragon.  He was born to fly and breath fire. 

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

All week we've been having so much in honor of Dr. Seuss' birthday! Today we were detectives looking for evidence on why the day was a "Wacky Wednesday" in Dr. Seuss' book. We've talked about rhyming words, word patterns, onomatopoeia and laughed...a lot!!! We've looked at Dr. Seuss quotes and talked about the meaning behind them. 

Yesterday, we had the pleasure of a guest reader to read "Oh the Thinks You Can Think!" Allison is a volunteer member of the Young Lawyers Division of BAMSL. The kids really enjoyed her read aloud and talking about their favorite books. Even better, Allison and I went to high school together! It was great to see her and catch up. The kids just thought that had to have been forever ago that we were in high school and couldn't quite believe it :). A big thanks to Allison for taking time out of her day to support reading and hang out in our classroom! 

Book Buddies!

The Humane Society has a program where children can read to the dogs. I have seen this in action and steal my heart, it's precious. What a great activity for both the child and the dog. If you're kinder is a pet lover, this is something you should definitely look into. If you participate, PLEASE take pics to share! Thank you to Mrs. Lamont for sharing:

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STAR Test Tomorrow, Thursday!

 

We will take our STAR reading assessment in the computer lab tomorrow morning, Thursday.  Please be sure your kinder gets a good night's sleep and a healthy breakfast!  Reviewing sight words this evening would be helpful. 

Reading Fun!

We couldn't get into the library today, SO, we moved the chairs and got to read under the table (these are the moments I love KDG even more...they thought this was the most exciting thing!). So fun!

Character Traits!

Today we read Thanksgiving for Emily Ann and compared/contrasted Emily in the beginning/middle/end of the story and talked about character traits (adjectives that describe the character). 

Cause and Effect

I've introduced cause and effect. Please incorporate cause and effect situations at home too! The more connections they make, the easier it is for them to understand and apply.

Daily 5

Author's Purpose is Easy as P.I.E

Today I introduced author's purpose (persuade, inform, entertain). This is a complex comprehension strategy but we'll frequently visit it in conversation. We read Monster Mash and decided it was definitely an entertaining kind of book! 

Reading Vocab.10/19-10/23

I had a request to start posting our weekly reading vocabulary words and loved the idea! They will be under the "reading" label. They love learning new words and we try to incorporate them in our daily conversations. 

October Book Studies

What a fun week we had doing a different "book study" each day with some of our Halloween books!  This is one of the four that we did.  From a simple read aloud, we had the best discussions and charted our noticings with: verbs, common/proper nouns, adjectives, wacky "y" words, main idea, setting, characters, onomatopoeia and much more!  The crew really enjoyed this!  They are loving finding "onomatopoeia" whenever they can!  All of our tricks we have, I told them they'd have to teach everyone at home since they are the experts.   

*"Schema" was also introduced to the crew this week: background knowledge.  Using what we already know about something.*

Fluent Readers...

Today we discussed thugs that fluent readers do! Please refer to these when reading at home. In October we'll say a poem each day to work on/build fluency focusing on each of the points below.

Reading Strategies

Eight tricks for our reading magic bag!!! Please use these strategies at home...

Building Stamina!

We are rocking and rolling in literacy centers now! After I got my small group working on something I looked up to find everyone doing "their job!" Happy moment for this dear teacher. Before we go to centers we state our expectations together with our hand motions:

We stay in one spot.

We work the whole time.

We get started right away.

When we hear the clean up bell, we stop right away and come back to the carpet like a learner.

When I Was Little...

For a shared writing lesson today we had some fun incorporating our book from reading this week.  We made connections to the girl in the story with her memories from when she was "little".  We had a great time giggling through everyone's "When I was little I...but now I..."  Enjoy :)