literacy this week

Morning Meeting

Our greeting during morning meeting is a time to reinforce and support the children's developing skill of listening to the parts or syllables in a word and showing how many. 

We have done this with our own names and the names of our peers by clapping the parts in a name, patting the floor like a drum, feeling how our chin moves when we say a name, jumping to show how many parts, and using cubes to show how many parts. 

During our morning greeting we can practice essential literacy standards, like listening for the parts in a word, and math standards, counting and showing how many. Once a child shows the parts in their name, we say their name back to them with a wave!

Our names are a meaningful way to introduce the concept that words are made up of parts. We can notice how many parts in Reid's name compared to how many parts in Oliver's name. We can then listen for the parts in words of things around our classroom, like window or table. 

You can do this at home with the names of your family. You can do this with words in your home, too!

Our morning message continues to invite students to circle noticings, fill in missing letters or words, answer and respond to questions, and engage in choral reading. Below are a few pictures from this week of children circling a missing letter and printing the missing letter. 

The children have also taken on the responsibility of pointing to the words on our morning message and leading our choral read. This has become a very exciting new job in our classroom!

Reading Workshop

The children started the week continuing the reading of teaching books. They used sticky notes to share wow pages; pages with really interesting information! We practiced sharing wow pages with a partner. The readers were expected to introduce the topic of their book, show their wow page and tell why they chose their wow page.

Later in the week we transitioned to reading favorite storybooks and used pictures of front covers to sort books; Is this book a teaching book or a storybook? How do you know? What have we noticed about storybooks?

We have read and reread many storybooks this week! The children are practicing using the pictures and what they know about how the story goes to read the story to their partner. Next week we will practice acting out favorite storybooks.

Writing Workshop

The children have published so many powerful pieces of work this year, including their leaf animal alphabet book. Using examples of their work to empower them as writers, we launched the writing workshop. They designed a front cover for their blue writing folder, using pictures to show the many things they want to write about this year.

We talked about how we all know about a lot of different things. The children used their interests and passions to choose a topic to teach us about for their first piece.

Below is Maia's example. She is writing a teaching book about art, because she knows a lot about art. Maia is teaching us different information about art on every page. She used her zones of regulation to write the color words on her drawing of crayons!