Real-Life Readers and Writers!

This week, we've been practicing reading independently and with a partner as we picture walk and learn from the words, pictures, and photos in our stories. 

We learned that some books have stories about characters and some teach us about things in the world around us. We can start a book by looking at the cover, thinking about what the book might be about, and then reading it cover to cover. We also practiced finding "just right" reading spots all around our classroom!

On Thursday, we had our first-ever "Book Club" meeting where each of us shared a "WOW" page from our books! We learned about baby sea turtles, tornadoes, sharks, bats, and more!

Every day, we've been discovering more and more words that we already know how to read! 

We've also been using what we've been learning from our reading to help us with our writing! We know we can help to share information by writing letters and words along with the pictures we draw. On Thursday, we used what we know about writing and drawing to represent words that started with the letter F! Can you guess what words these giraffes were showing? 

Fish

Football

Five Fourteen PM

We are so excited to continue growing and stretching our literacy brains as we continue to learn more about the words and world around us! 

Nonfiction Celebrations

Over the last two months, the giraffes have been reading and writing all sorts of nonfiction books! We learned that the purpose of a nonfiction book is to teach us true facts. Some fiction books can have true facts in them, but ALL the facts in a nonfiction book are true. 

While reading nonfiction books, we learned the lingo behind different topics, wrote down facts we learned and added to those facts by reading multiple books about the same topic. We also asked and researched questions about our different topics to learn more! After finding many facts, we chose our most interesting ones to share in our very own Weird But True video:

The first nonfiction books we created were our Who Am I? booklets. Each giraffe chose an animal to research, and painted a close-up of that animal's skin, a close-up of their eye, and then a full picture of the animal. The first two pictures were accompanied by 6 clues about that animal to help the reader guess which animal it was, and finally the full animal picture was accompanied by an acrostic poem about the animal. 

Can you guess what these animals are based on their eyes and their clues??

Answer: Elephant

Answer: Cat

Answer: Rattlesnake

After doing our animal research, we used our knowledge about nonfiction text features to create our Expert Project books! We wrote about topics that we already knew a lot about, such as dogs, cats, girl scouts, gymnastics, karate, The White Mountains, along with many others! Our books had everything from maps, diagrams, a table of contents, glossaries,  and even how-to guides! 

We all got to check out everyone's amazing books before our gingerbread decorating party and compliment them on our favorite parts! 

We can't wait to share our books with our families and learn more awesome facts from nonfiction books!