Building Stamina

Following the STAR Reading Test, students headed to the Book Nook for a little Independent Reading.  Next week we will begin calling Independent Reading time Read to Self time.

Each student found a cozy little place to begin reading and read independently for about 10 minutes.

I know 10 minutes does not sound like a long time, but many students need to build up their independent reading stamina.  We took a few minutes to learn about the word stamina and what it means to our reading ability.

 I used my marathon training as an example of stamina.  I explained that if I went out on week 1 and was expected to run 26.2 miles that I would be setting myself up for failure.  Running 26.2 miles takes a lot of training and practice.  I must start out with low mileage and slowly increase my distance, or stamina, until I reach my goal.

Students must do the same thing when reading.  I cannot sit them down during the first week of school, following months of summer vacation and freedom, and expect them to read independently, silently, and still for 45 minutes.  If I expect them to do that then I am setting them up for immediate failure.  In order to build confidence in their ability to read I must first provide them with opportunities to feel successful!

Today most of us read for the full 10 minutes without moving or becoming distracted.  We will try again tomorrow and Friday until we master the art of reading for 10 uninterrupted minutes.  Next week we will begin increasing our stamina by 2 minutes every other day :)

Read To Someone Continues

We will be launching read to someone for the next 6+ days.  Today we learned the other 2 ways we can read to someone when we are in the classroom.  Two of the ways we read to someone require us to be reading the same book, but the third way we learned today allows us to read 2 different books.  Reading 2 different books can be very challenging so we decided that it would be best if we only let our advanced readers work in that area for now.

The students had an option today of whether they wanted to practice a read to someone skill or read to self.  The students split themselves and half chose to read to self while the other half chose to read to someone.  We practiced our EEKK position and spreading ourselves out more today and I must say the students did a FABULOUS job!

Read To Someone

Today we launched Read To Someone.  The students and I met at the carpet to learn a little about Read To Someone before we gave it a try.  We will be learning different ways to Read To Someone during the next few days, and we will practice this skill with Read To Self for the next few weeks.

Reading to someone will help us build our fluency, improve our accuracy and comprehension, and become more comfortable with reading aloud.  Reading to someone is also FUN because it adds some variety to reading!

Tomorrow we will be working on EEKK and spreading ourselves out more.

Setting Goals

Today we spent a large amount of our time discussing goals and setting a couple for ourselves.  We began by meeting and having a classroom discussion about goals. 

This is what we came up with:

We then took a few minutes to set an academic and personal goal for ourselves.  After we set our goals we came up with an action plan for achieving our goals!

Finally, we put our academic goal on a t-shirt to hang in the hallway so that everyone will know what we're working toward.

Our T-Riffic Goals!

Today we also got our new Go Math! books.  Each student received 2 books that they are allowed to write in.  They seemed pretty excited about that :).  We also took a pre-assessment for chapter one.

We are continuing to work on Read To Self.

Today we put our book bags together so that we will be prepared during read to self time.

We also had a chance to get in a few minutes of Read To Self time.

Day Two - Another GREAT Day!

This morning we went to the computer lab to take a STAR Reading test.  The STAR Reading test provided each student with an average reading level.  I met with each student during Daily Three time today and discussed their reading level with them.  The two of us devised a plan for selecting appropriate books for them to read.  We will do a more detailed lesson on choosing appropriate books later in the week.  Ask your child what their reading level is and ask what baskets they are allowed to choose books from!

Following counseling we came back to the classroom and discussed respect.  We plan to have respect for each other, our classroom, ourselves, and our belongings this year.  We had a great conversation and came up with some great ideas.

Later in the morning we had a chance to get in a small math lesson.  We began by working on daily data using a Venn Diagram.  We set-up our math notebooks and began writing down our observations about the data we created.

We also had a chance to use numbers to answer questions about ourselves.

We began our first class read aloud, The City of Ember.  We also read aloud a picture book called Three Cheers for Tacky.  The kids loved the book and learned how to tune into interesting vocabulary as we read.  We finished up reading with our Read To Self time.  We are working on building our stamina back up from summer break so we only read independently for 10 minutes.  Ask your child if they remember what it means to build stamina!

We had another a great day!

Our First Day of School

We had a GREAT first day.  We were so incredibly busy that I forgot to take any pictures.  I ALWAYS take a class picture on the first day and totally forgot until the bus bell had rang yesterday.  Mrs. Jones popped in and snapped this picture for our Facebook page, so I snagged a copy of it so that we would at least have one picture of our first day together.

We began our morning learning a few procedures for our classroom.  Each student received a handbook and we talked through a few of the procedures like morning routine, entering the classroom, bathroom, etc...

After reviewing a few procedures we took some time to talk about the kind of teacher we want.  This is the list the students came up with.

We read two books yesterday.  The first one we read was Don't Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus.  The kids thought it was funny and we learned how to check for comprehension while we read.  The second book we read was Chrysanthemum.  Again, the students loved the book.  We used this book to work on accuracy when reading by cross-checking when we are unsure of a word.

After we learned our two reading strategies we began discussing Daily Three Time.  We launched Read To Self so that students could begin working on independent reading.  We created this iChart to help us understand Read To Self.

We will add our last way to read a book tomorrow.

We spent most of the day getting to know one another and learning about our classroom.  I know we are going to have a great year together!