Week Three: June 25 - June 29
It's our third week of summer school, and things are moving right along in the Reading and Writing Workshop!
Reading
We finally started our book clubs this week. The students had a choice of the following books: Ralph S. Mouse, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, and The Phantom Tollbooth. We set the following goals for our book clubs: read together, cooperate and learn together, help each other understand the book, share opinions about the book, and have good discussions or conversations about the book.
This week we continued to talk about the reading strategy of making predictions. Along with making predictions, we are learning how to use our inference skills to “read between the lines” to determine what the author is trying to tell us.
Writing
We have been working hard on our newspaper articles. The students are anxious to see their work published. In the coming days, we will learn about writing strong conclusions and explore the genre of “how-to writing.”
We hope you enjoy the Summer School Pueo!
Reading with our kindergarten buddies!
Interviewing a Jump Start Kindergarten teacher and her assistant
Posted at 5:19 PM| Permalink
Week Two: June 18-22
It’s been another busy week in the Reading and Writing Workshop! Everyone has been working really hard to build our classroom community, our goal this week. We have been writing letters to each other. Not only are we building our letter-writing skills, but we have gotten to know one another better.
Reading
Last week we talked about how creating mental images helps us to understand the story better and think more clearly about the characters, setting, and important events. This week we practiced using the reading strategy of making predictions. Making predictions required us to explain “why” we thought the way we did. We had to take clues from the story and combine them with our own knowledge to make a prediction.
We continue to read our read-aloud book, The Castle in the Attic. The students also have time for reading their own pleasure books and the newspaper.
On Friday we paired up with some kindergarten students and read to them! The students enjoyed modeling their reading skills and doing something special for their younger peers.
Writing
Along with letter writing, all of the students have begun working on their newspaper articles. Everyone has chosen the type of article that they want to write. The different types of articles range from feature articles to movie reviews to comics. The students are learning how to conduct interviews by “anticipating what the reader wants to know” and answering the who, what, when, where, why, and how when writing their articles. We are also learning how to use graphic organizers to organize our thinking prior to writing. We use webs for brainstorming and a FATP organizer to organize our facts and details. This week we focused on writing a “lively lead” or “hook” to grab the reader's attention. In our class we say that we are “fishing for readers." Once the newspaper is published, I think you will be impressed with the creative “hooks” we came up with!
We weren't able to publish our newspaper this week and hope to have our first edition published by next Friday. We are taking our time as we work through the writing process (brainstorming, drafting, revising, editing), which helps ensure that we are producing our best work.
Posted at 6:01 PM| Permalink
Week 1: June 11 - June 15
Welcome to the Reading and Writing Workshop weblog. I will be posting updates about our class’s weekly happenings each Friday afternoon.
Building our Classroom Community
This week was a busy week as we spent a lot of time getting to know one another and establishing our classroom and school community. We know that if we want to be successful with our book clubs and our newspaper we need to work together. Some of the activities we participated in to help us grow as a community were name games and team-building activities, creating classroom jobs and responsibilities, deciding upon classroom rules and agreeing to a contract, working together for our newspaper inquiry, and co-authoring a letter to the school about participation in our summer school newspaper.
Reading and Writing
This week we also got a feel for some of the reading activities we will be focusing on this summer. We participated in a variety of word study activities. We are creating a list of overused words that will be “on vacation” this summer as we find and use synonyms for them in our writing. We also used a morning message to study basic conventions skills, and we are beginning to look at different ways to decode a larger word by looking for smaller words within it. This week, the children also learned about the reading strategy of creating mental images. We will continue to work with this strategy throughout the summer.
We were fortunate this week to have a guest speaker, Mr. Curtis Murayama. Mr. Murayama is the editor of the sports section of the Honolulu Advertiser; his son is in our class. He gave us insight about the newspaper business that we can use as we begin to develop our own weekly summer school newspaper. Thank you, Mr. Murayama! The newspaper should be a fun way to learn about the writing process and different kinds of writing. The kids have already taken ownership of this endeavor as they are the ones making the majority of the decisions about what articles to write, the name of the newspaper, the jobs, etc…
Our class voted, and we will be reading The Castle in the Attic as our read-aloud book. Our book club books should be arriving soon. The students will be choosing a book to read that seems interesting to them and is at their reading level. We will begin our book club study by making predictions about our books.
Next week, we will begin to jump into our newspaper interviewing and writing. We will be looking at different genres of writing such as writing reviews and feature articles. We will also continue our word study and begin our book club activities.
Signing our Contract
Newspaper Inquiry
Newspaper Inquiry
Posted at 4:13 PM| Permalink