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 :)

Enjoying The Outdoors

After our rainy weekend, we spent a lot of time outside this week so we could enjoy the sunshine. On Wednesday, we even took the series books we've been reading outside so we could do our independent reading out in the garden! 

We saw lots of little critters outside, including inch worms, butterflies, ladybugs, and bumble bees, who were buzzing around and pollinating all of the flowers around the garden. We also got to see the purple lilacs growing by the picnic tables. We just learned that the purple lilac is our state flower and the ladybug is our state insect!

Our day may have been short, but it was certainly sweet :)