We had a fabulous week filled with reading and writing activities. We will just give you the highlights because sometimes we think we're too wordy.
When we think about a few of our favorite things, word block is not one of them. We are not big phonics people. However, this week we did have some fun with phonics and vocabulary, but we always have fun with vocabulary.
To solidify the bossy r syllable type, the students went on a scavenger hunt around the room to find words with the bossy r. They made their own charts, shared them with the class, and now whenever they spot a bossy r word they can add it to the chart.
We used scarecrow poems to enrich our students' vocabulary. Often with vocabulary we differentiate the kids into two groups. With these poems one group focused solely on the word tattered. The other group had many amazing words in their poem to choose from. Each group looked up the definition of the word on Fact Monster. Then we made a scarecrow craft and wrote the word and definition on it.
We have been working on narrative writing for a while. This is a challenging genre and we celebrated the kids' efforts. The students worked in groups of three to write a narrative piece about going to a pumpkin farm. They really worked hard to cooperate and pull their ideas together into a detailed story. After some revising we published them.
Building fluency was fun. We began this lesson with an idea we learned about at the Smekens' workshop we attended last month. We started reading a story aloud using choppy, monotone voices. We kept reading like that until the kids finally asked why we were "reading like that?" This question led us into making a fluency rubric. Together as a class, we decided what a good, fluent reader's voice needed to sound like and what a poor fluency reader's voice sounded like. Then students paired up to practice reading a poem for two voices from the poem book titled You Read to Me, I'll Read to You: Very Short Scary Tales to Read Together by Mary Ann Hoberman. Students used the rubric to try and make their voices as fluent as possible. After practicing for about 15 minutes we brought the students back to the carpet and read aloud Yo! Yes? by Chris Raschka. We focused on how our voices should sound as we noticed punctuation marks. We made a chart to help us remember. They went back to practice again, being aware of the punctuation. Next week we plan to record their performances on a podcast. Hopefully we will be able to upload it here and share it with you.
Have a fabulous weekend.
Kim and Anne
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