Friday, November 30, 2007

Today, we talked about Patricia Polacco. She is an outstanding author, illustrator, and storyteller. She is one of Ms. Stern’s most favorite children’s authors. Many of her books are memoirs, just like the ones we are writing. So far, we have read My Rotten Redheaded Older Brother and The Keeping Quilt. We watched some short video clips of Patricia explaining how and why she got so good at telling the stories about her life. Her grandmother, who she called bubbie, was the best storyteller in her family. We even looked on her website (http://www.patriciapolacco.com/) to find out more about her and learn from her to become better authors, ourselves. This afternoon, we got to continue working on our own memoirs.

After independent reading time, Ms. Stern recorded some children during their partnership time. The whole class watched the clips together and discussed what went well and how partnerships can be improved. We noticed that children were sitting hip to hip, asking appropriate questions about the books, and both partners were sharing materials and using good body language. Next week, we are going to concentrate on keeping voices down, asking questions and having both partners speaking, and not always having to look at the Smartboard for questions to ask. Also, we’re going to try to remember not to ask to use the bathroom during independent reading time.