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 on June 14, 2007 4:13 PM | Permalink