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.

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