We're Busy Learners!

It's been a busy week for us! We continue to learn new routines and practice and practice and practice already learned routines. They are doing so well! I'm excited about all the blog permission slips I'm getting back! I am waiting for a few more and then will be able to take more pictures during our learning. Here are some pictures to highlight what we've focused on this week.

We added our pictures and names to our word wall. This room is becoming more and more ours!

On Monday we learned our first piece of Daily 5 (Or what we call Daily 3).  This part is Read To Self. Students made this I-Chart below. The I stands for Independent. We are learning to become independent readers.

Each day we practice Read To Self 2 times. We are working on building our stamina. Each time we start I set a timer and we see how long we can ALL be reading. (It's very hard to get 23 first graders all on task at the same time!) We measure our stamina on this staminometer:

Monday we made it to 15 seconds!

Tuesday we made it to 45 seconds! (We stayed at 45 seconds on Wednesday.)

Thursday we made it all the way to 2 Minutes!!!!

We will keep up the hard work! When we get to 3 minutes we get to choose our own spots to sit and read! When we get to 10 minutes Mrs. Bowers gets to start meeting with students one-on-one!

We learned about our second part of Daily 3 on Tuesday, Work on Writing. The students created this I-Chart below:

They are doing a wonderful job at Work On Writing so far. We learned one strategy this week. "Stretch out unkown words." We will learn another strategy next week. (Pictures of those to come next week!)

Last week, this week and next week we are working on an author study unit about Kevin Henkes. The students have listened to several books written and illustrated by Kevin Henkes. They are getting really good at identifying the setting, main characters, problem and solution. With each book we have done an activity. Below are a couple of the activities. A full post on our author study will come at the conclusion!

Name Art after reading Chrysanthemum.

Drawing us and our imaginary friends after reading Jessica.

Next week we will work even harder each day on reading, continue building read to self stamina, work on writing, finish our Kevin Henkes unit and of course, have fun while we learn! Enjoy your first 3-day weekend of the year!