Small Moment Stories

 In Writer's Workshop we talked about our writing topics. We read two books by Donald Crews. 

The first one is called BigMama's, and it is about how when Donald Crews was little he spent a few weeks each summer at his grandma and grandpa's house.

Then we read the book Shortcut, and found out that this story was about one specific memory that happened one of those summers that Donald Crews spent at Bigmama's.

We are trying to write about specific memories, just like Donald Crews did in his book, Shortcut.

We talked about how some ideas are too big, like a watermelon.

Within a big idea, though, there are lots of little seed ideas.

For example, school is a too-big watermelon idea, but one seed idea would be our memory about when the fire alarm went off right before gym. Another seed idea would be when Lydia got stronger at the monkey bars . We can be really specific and add good details when we write a seed idea story.

Can you give an example of a too big watermelon idea, and then a specific memory like a seed idea?

Our First Chapter Book Read Aloud

 During snack time this year we will be enjoying lots of different chapter books as read alouds. 

Today we voted on which chapter book we will read first. After a book talk about each choice, we all got one sticky note to vote for our favorite. 

Here are our results:

We counted the votes, then double-checked the count like mathematicians do...

James & The Giant Peach received the greatest number of votes!

Our First Chapter Book Read Aloud

 During snack time we will be reading a chapter book for a read aloud. This is a great time to get Room 612 thinking deeply about books that are above their reading text level.  We will be doing high level thinking such as predicting, and inferring as well as laughing and crying as we enjoy powerful books together.

Our first three choices are:

After reading the blurbs on the back of the books, we voted.

Here are the results!

We're excited to read Charlotte's Web, first!

Rockin' with Pete the Cat

 Today we read the book Pete the Cat Rocking in My School Shoes.

We also enjoyed listening to the rhythm of the book in this video:

 

 Then we decided what we were doing in our school shoes! Watch this video to see what your child did in his/her school shoes.

Sending Encouragement Across the Miles

 Lately we have been noticing how our words can help or hurt.  We can choose to have powerful self-talk, and we can use our words to encourage others. Our words are powerful!

I shared the following quotation with Room 408:

We read the book The Bad Seed by Jory John and noticed how the bad seed became what he told himself he was. When he said he was bad he would do more bad things, when he said he was doing well he did kind things.

We talked about how positive self-talk is very important, especially when things get tough.  I shared with Room 612 how my son, CJ, is in Basic Military Training right now. (CJ is in the middle, 3rd from the left).

 CJ sent a letter to me last night requesting that our first graders send letters to his flight. There are some members who aren't getting any letters from home. We talked about how challenging Basic Training is, especially when no one is sending letters of encouragement.

We worked on writing words of encouragement and pictures to Flight 732. Here are a few examples:

We sent over 45 letters!

Tomorrow we will make a ring of self-affirmations to keep in our safe zone, to give ourselves words of encouragement.

Here is a great video about believing in yourself.

Workshops

 Our workshops are how we'll get all our learning done this year.

We start with a minilesson (a tip or strategy to make us smarter), follow with independent work time (where we practice our craft), and end with reflection (where we share how we got smarter).

Here is a chart to help us understand the structure of workshops.

Here we are hard at work in our workshops:

We have been working hard and learning during our reading and writing workshops!

Functional Parts

We have been doing a Steve Jenkins author study while we are doing our animal inquiry.  Steve Jenkins is such a great author and illustrator (and often works with Robin Page on his books), and we have really enjoyed his books.

These are just a few of our favorites:

By studying his books, Steve Jenkins has taught us to to think in different ways about animals.

Steve Jenkins calls them "Creature Features" and Wild Kratts call them "Creature Powers."  Any way you describe it, animals have cool functional parts!

What parts do you see on these animals that help them survive?

We watched a special video about an owl and the special features it has for hunting.

We watched the owl video a second time and labeled the functional parts.

Here are functional parts that we noticed:

You might also enjoy this video: 

If you're interested to learn more about Steve Jenkins and his artwork, click on the video below!

Thank you, Steve Jenkins!

Published Authors!

We have been working on fixing and fancying up our favorite personal narrative stories to publish.

We even added blurbs on the back!

We were so excited to read each other's stories.

 We are so proud of our work as published authors!

Dick Proenneke

We have been reading Little House on the Prairie during our Snack/Read Aloud time.

The Ingalls family traveled all the way from the big woods of Wisconsin to a homestead near Independence, Kansas.

We have gotten to one of my favorite parts of the book, which is when Pa builds their log cabin.

Undoubtedly at this point in the book after seeing the above picture, one of the kids makes a connection about Lincoln Logs.

I pulled out the Lincoln Logs from our storage room and the kids started building and exploring. 

Here is a picture of the re-creation of Little House on the Prairie in Kansas, near Independence.

Next, I introduced them to a movie about a man named Dick Proenneke.  

He was a man who decided to test himself to see if he could live off the land, all alone in Alaska.  He built a cabin from scratch, using only hand tools--he brought the steel parts of the tools, but even built the handles of the tools with local wood.  We learned that he was a mathematician when he measured and constructed the cabin, as well as a writer because he recorded his life and experiences in journals.

Today we got to see him building his cabin in the documentary Alone in the Wilderness.

The kids were in awe as we watched him chop and saw, carry tree trunks, construct his log cabin, build a fireplace, make furniture...just like Pa in Little House on the Prairie!

To learn more about Dick Proenneke and his adventures in the Alaskan Wilderness:

click these words to learn more about purchasing the documentary

click these words to learn more about his life

click these words to be taken to the National Park website where his cabin is located

click these words to go to a youtube search for various videos about Dick Proenneke

or watch this youtube video below:

Do you think you could do something like Dick Proenneke?