Friday, October 16, 2009

Mrs. O’Donnell came back to our class this morning to discuss the Little Book of Rules that we all received. She brought two friends with her: Shy and Why. Shy is a raccoon and Why is a bird. Ms. Stern helped Mrs. O’Donnell by reading the rules. Shy asked Charlie Caps lots of questions. The children in the class were able to answer them for Shy. Why liked to ask LOTS of questions. Mrs. Polansky said he was inquisitive. Again, the children in the class helped to answer and explain the rules to him. We all agreed to follow the school rules, especially now that we understand them better.

We are finishing up our first Reader’s Workshop unit: Readers Build Good Habits. Everyone is focusing on using all of their time to read privately and have accountable talk during partner time. Ms. Stern has been reading with children to find their “just-right books.”

We started working on a booklet all about our families. We know that families sometimes share a name. We discovered that many families in our class have two different names. On one page in our book, we drew our family names in fancy ways. Dylan A. and Lauria used bubble letters. Some people wrote in script. Amanda used bubble letters with stars on the bottom. Some people used dots and flowers. We also drew a portrait of our families. Stephen and Anthony D. had 7 people. Nancy and Jacob had 4. Adam had 5 people.

Today we went to art. We had Mrs. G. Mrs. Piteo wasn’t here. We worked on still life drawings, using crayons or pencils. The still life was a basket with flowers and decorations like pumpkins, pine cones, gourds, flowers, grapes, and leaves. Sarah thought the pumpkins weren’t hard to draw but the baskets were tricky. Drew loved the different colors and also the grapes. Emma liked getting to do free drawing after she was done.

We are finishing up our first Writer’s Workshop unit. We are getting our pieces of writing ready to be published. It’s called “fancying up.” Yesterday, we checked to make sure our writing included: where, who, when, and what happened. Today we worked on our spelling. We used special purple pens to edit our work. Everyone had to find at least 3 words to fix. We circled them and then corrected words that were found around the room or were spelling/word wall words. If we thought a word wasn’t spelled right, we tried it 3 ways and thought, “Which one looks right?” People who finished editing began writing an “About the Author” page. Next week, the whole first grade is going to have a writer’s celebration together. Then we are going to share our first published pieces with the children from our kindergarten classes!

We are reading our third Junie B. Jones book called Junie B. First Grader: BOO and I Mean It! We think it's funny. Emma brought in two books to share with the class this week. One was about monkeys jumping on the bed. She thought Amanda would enjoy it. It turned out that the whole class did! Today we read a Charlie and Lola story called I'm NOT Sleepy and I Will NOT Go to Bed.