Thankful for you!

Thank you to all my teacher friends who have been faithful followers of mine for the past two years. You'll never know how much I appreciate your kindness, your willingness to share and support. That being said, I thought I'd share some of the things that we've been doing this past week.

This unit in Reader's Workshop we've been talking about reading strategies and now we're working on how to be fluent. Students practiced fluent reading in their book nooks and then met with their reading partners to model fluent reading for each other. I have a lot of friends who ask where I get my plans for Reader's Workshop. All of my units come from 2 books. The units I cover come entirely from Growing Readers and Debbie Miller's, Reading With Meaning. They are great books for those of you just starting out using the workshop model. If you are a kindergarten teacher I also suggest you check out Kim Adsit's, Reader's Workshop Units. They are amazing and so thorough.

In Writer's Workshop we've been discussing writing Narratives by looking at the story elements. We've talked about how stories always include a setting, characters and today we looked at how authors begin their stories. We discussed "leads" and reviewed a few different types of leads. We saw how Patricia Palacco begins The Bee Tree with dialogue, but Angela Johnson starts Joshua's Night Whispers with the setting of the story. Students were encouraged to look at the beginning of their stories and see if they could hook the reader in one of these ways.

This week we'll be learning all about Pilgrims, Native Americans, and The First Thanksgiving. My student's started our Thanksgiving centers today.

Here are a few of the centers they'll do this week.

I also recently introduced the common core standard that states student's should really understand the meaning of the equal sign and have the ability to determine if an equation is true or false. I created this as a center, but decided we would complete this activity together as a class for further practice of this skill. Some of my sweet babies are still struggling with this concepts and other's are soaring. So we'll keep plugging away until True and False tricks us no more!