This week in Literacy

This week in literacy, our 1st graders had a chance to share their personal narrative stories with their 4th Grade reading buddies. The 4th grade writers also surprised us by sharing their published realistic fiction stories. We really celebrated it like a grown-up book party! If you ever come by our classroom, please take a look at our published stories - they are displayed on our writing bulletin board.

In word work, students are learning the various word (inflectional) endings. They helped me come up with words they see everyday in their books, classroom labels, word wall and charts that have the same word endings. For example, -ing, -ed, -ly, -er, and -ful. We then brainstormed a bunch of words that have those endings. It amazes me how our children are applying the knowledge they have about inflectional endings and using it to help them decode and spell tricky words.

"Morning message" is part of our morning literacy routine. Each day I write them a letter, informing them how the day would go and the special events coming up in school. They have been reading these messages everyday and completing and writing missing letters and words in the message. Yesterday, we began to compose a morning message together rather than just me writing it out for them. They had a chance to turn and talk to their partners and brainstorm ideas and sentences they could include in the morning message, including a general greeting, a current school activity or event, and a question or some sort of closing sentence. They were all very excited about contributing their ideas. After we had a general idea of what our morning message would look like, students took turns sharing a pen and composing the message together. This activity, called, interactive writing, is beneficial to young writers because it encourages them to collaborate with others, build their letter/sound understanding, vocabulary, and concepts about print. It also emphasizes the importance of the "rehearsing" and "planning" stage of the writing process.

In reading and writing this week, students were introduced to our new poetry unit. Many poems were shared and written together as a class. We read poems by Zoe Ryder White, Shel Silverstein, Eloise Greenfield, and Valerie Worth. Our readers and writers have been looking closely and identifying the smart and interesting things and strategies that these poets used. For example, we read two poems by Valerie Worth, Goldfish and Dog, and we came up with an idea that Valerie Worth is a poet who probably likes to write about her pets. In Shel Silverstein's poem, Shapes, and Zoe Ryder White's poem, Pencil Sharpener, we noticed that these poets both turned something so ordinary into lively characters in a poem. Today, our children learned that poets look at the world in a fresh, new way by taking any ordinary objects and using descriptive poetic language to capture readers' attention. Each of them got a poetry notepad to jot their ideas down. They were very excited about turning these seed ideas into poetry.