Celebrating Choice in the New Year

I'm celebrating NOT spending days setting up my classroom.  I'm looking forward to school starting next Wednesday and meeting my new group of learners.

I am excited to share my reading life with my new readers. It's fun to xerox some of the covers of the books I read this summer. The minute my new students arrive they will know their teacher is a reader. I also include a few personal photos of my reading life and favorite places I like to read. 

For years, I spent hours getting my library ready. Not anymore last year's class organized this library. Mixing all of the books up leaving serval hints about how this new class could organize it.  One of my favorite conversations:

•  "Do you have this book?"  
• I reply, "I sure do in the library"
• "Where in the library?"
• I reply, "I don't know."

Conversations above lead us into a class discussion about how do you want to organize the library?  Thanks to Ruth for encouraging us to celebrate. 

the BEST WONDERful Wednesday

Hooray for Wonderful Wednesday-it is my favorite day of the week and the students were ALL STARS.  For our opening the students WONDER about words and work on word ladders Every Wednesday, our spectacular librarian, Bill from LIterate LIves includes our preschoolers and kindergartners in the library schedule. So as classroom teachers, we choose to have a shorten library so all students at our school can have a chance to visit the library. Here is a picture walk of our Wednesday-come along and enjoy! 

We always start with a focus: practicing reading strategies: applying background knowledge (BK), choosing important new facts, choosing vocabulary and writing sentences that show context of words and finally an enrichment opportunity using the wonder links. I always build an anchor chart so that the students can refer to it later in addition the writing on the right was new thinking from last week's ideas.  Next we look at the wonder of the day.

 As we look at the wonder, we start to have a conversation about our BK and I chart this also on paper.  This was an interesting conversation because all my students knew that computers don't have "real" bugs they have bugs that cause problems, so they were feeling super smart! We then clicked on the wonder and watched the video which they loved and always do! Next we read the next 3 wonder statements and continued our conversation about BK. I am really trying to reinforce the importance of using their prior knowledge often kids skip that part and need reinforcement. 

Next I had them work with partners and using their iPods they read the rest of the article and recorded their new facts, vocabulary words and then checked in with me. Once again, I was totally impressed with their conversations and thinking.  I just would drop in and listen-wow they were really having a higher level conversation.  

 Once I approved their work, they were able to do the enrichment activity which was a link on the wonder-Ladybug Maze which was awesome.  Because it involved math: measuring, angles and cardinal directions. It was a HUGE challenge for the students-great thinking.

Finally we came back together and shared our new learning which we post in the comment section of the wonder and send it off which is exciting for the students because typically by the end of the day we already have a response back-powerful!