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! 

Noticing Author Craft: Kevin Henkes

We've been reading lots of stories by author and illustrator Kevin Henkes recently. Over the last few days, we've notices noticed certain parts of his writing and illustrations appear in many of his books. This week, Ms. Riley told us those things we'd been noticing are part of Kevin Henkes' craft. His craft involves anything he does on purpose to make his writing look or sound a certain way. It is the art of writing!

We've read lots of Kevin Henkes books together as a class, and we began to notice that he frequently includes mouse characters in his stories, characters with "rock brain", repeating lines, multiple pictures on a page, speech bubbles in illustrations, and lots of dialogue. Some of his books even have some of the same exact characters, like a series! 

After reading lots of his stories together as a class, we then set off to read his stories and notice his craft with our reading partners. We looked through lots of different Kevin Henkes stories, and while he didn't always use the same craft in every story, there were always at least a few!

We will continue to read Kevin Henkes stories over the next few weeks, and we will even get the opportunity to write like Kevin Henkes ourselves and develop our own Author Craft! Stay tuned :)

Growing Our Literacy Lens

Over the last few weeks, we've been working on growing our reading and writing stamina. We've also begun to think beyond our stories through read-alouds, turn and talks, and partner reading. 

Mrs. Belanger, our new Assistant Principal at SMS, came into our classroom to read the story Going Places by Peter and Paul Reynolds. During the story, she asked us to think about how we could work together to create new ideas and collaborate to make our work even better. We loved seeing how two brains could be better than one!

The giraffes continued to do an amazing job talking about and sharing stories when we began partner reading at the end of our Reader's Workshop. Everyone was focused on their partners and they were all very flexible when it came to taking turns reading and sharing the stories from their book bins!

In order to help us generate ideas for our small moment stories, all of the giraffes were asked to bring in pictures of the people, places, and things they love most. On Thursday, we used those pictures to decorate our writing folders, which we will use throughout the year to inspire our writing. 

We loved seeing everyone's folders once they were complete. Many of us were able to make several connections over the pictures we had! We will continue to grow our literacy lens as we begin to dive deeper into our reading and writing, and we can't wait to see where our new literacy skills will take us in second grade and beyond!

We Get By With A Little Help From Our Friends

Recently, we've been working hard on making our partnerships and group work during Reader's and Writer's Workshop more meaningful to our learning. 

In reading, we've been working a lot in our book clubs to look closely at our texts to help us think beyond the words and talk about the message the author is trying to convey. We've been making predictions and more importantly, we've been finding evidence from the text to support those predictions and inferences. 

We've talked a lot about how our reading and writing partners are like doctors (Thanks Mrs. Murphy for the comparison!)-- they tell us what is working well with our reading and with our writing, and they give us a prescription to help us make our work even better. Doctors give us very specific and clear feedback to help us, and so should our partners. While we take pride in our work, we and our partners are working with the mindset that there is always something we can do to improve it! 

This is going to be important for us to keep in mind throughout our work as we move into the second half of second grade. We have so much left to learn, and so much of that learning comes from each other :)

Diving Into Nonfiction

On Monday, we "read the room" to figure out what our new focus in Reader's Workshop would be. We noticed that there were now lots of stories about animals, science, social studies, and important people on display and we noticed a new anchor chart about growing our knowledge, so we inferred that we would be learning all about nonfiction books!

To remind ourselves of the differences between fiction and nonfiction, we worked together with our table mates to sort out some of the books in our leveled library. Afterwards, we each picked one of the nonfiction books and shared with the class what made that book nonfiction. We noticed nonfiction books always have true facts and often times have real pictures, a table of contents, a glossary, captions, diagrams, labels, maps, and an index. 

We also began working on keeping track of the facts we've learned on sticky notes and also writing down how we felt about the fact. Some were interesting and shocking, while others were exciting and even a little scary!We've been working hard to keep track of our thinking so we can share all of our facts with our new reading partners during partner reading! 

Awesome Partner Reading

This week, we began partner reading and our reader's share during Reader's Workshop. For our first partner reading experience, we talked about the books in our book bins with our partners and how they want to read.

We talked about what reading partners look and sound like. Partners should be sitting "knee to knee" or side by side so they can look on at the words in their partner's books. Partners should be listening and following along with their partners as they read so they can understand the story and help their partners with any trick spots! And partners should be talking about the stories they read and the connections they have to them. The giraffes did a great job with their first partner reading experience, we are excited to work with partners more next week and throughout the school year!