We Are Strong!

The first few weeks of school we have been establishing good habits during reading and writing workshop.  We are becoming stronger readers and writers every day.  We can already feel our brains growing!
Our first finished Reading Workshop anchor chart looks like this:

We finished with talking about how as we read, we build the story in our minds, just like when a house is being framed, built, and finished. When we read the title and do a sneak peek of a book, we are just beginning to build the story (just like the skeleton frame of a house).

As we learn more about the characters and story, we learn more and more about the story (like putting up walls, doors, and windows).  

When we finish the book, we have read the whole book and are thinking about big ideas.  That's like when the paint and finishing touches get put on the house.

For fun, we watched a timelapse of a real house being built.

The building analogy will be great for our next unit in Reading Workshop:  Our Reading Toolbox of Strategies.  Stay tuned!

For Writing Workshop, these were our main areas of focus during these first weeks of school.

We have also been reading and discussing powerful personal narratives by Tomie dePaola to help us tell our own powerful stories.

The most powerful was Now One Foot, Now the Other.  It had us laughing, feeling sad, feeling empathetic, feeling relieved, and finally feeling happy again.

We ended our anchor chart by focusing on "seed" stories, or "small moment" stories.
We saw the difference between a "watermelon" story and a "seed" story by reading some Donald Crews books.
Bigmama's is a "watermelon" story, because it is a story about lots of things that he did every summer when he went to his grandma's house. This big "watermelon" topic has so many little seed story ideas inside of it.

In contrast, Shortcut is a "seed" story, because it is about one specific memory of one time during all those summers that he spent at his grandma's house, when they decided to take the shortcut home.

We thought Shortcut was a way more powerful book and we made it a goal to try and write our own "seed" stories.

We are off to a great start to our year with our reading and writing workshops!