Celebrating Kevin Henkes

In the midst of Lucy Calkin's new writing units, first grade found a little space to celebrate one of its favorite authors - Kevin Henkes. After a four week study, the grade level came together for a little celebration of all they had learned.

Our first grade is large with thirteen teachers so any project that we do "together" is a big deal.  It's not easy when you're trying to get so many teachers to agree, but I work with one of those rare group of teachers that are remarkably collegial.  They share.  They support each other.  They work together.  With four teachers meeting as a small committee in just an afternoon after school, centers were designed and a celebration day was ready as a culminating event.   The students rotated through three centers.

The first center was watching movies of the books we had studied while the students ate "cheesy snacks" in celebration of all of Henkes' mice characters.

Then it was to the "Lightbulb Lab" to make Lilly's purple purses and movie star glasses and Mr. Slinger's ties and glasses.  This was probably the students' favorite center as the girls asked to wear the purses all the day and boys kept on the ties.







Finally the students moved to another room to play Kevin Henkes Bingo which was the perfect review of Henkes' characters and mice books.

Earlier in the week students had been divided into groups for Readers' Theater of some of the stories.  They practiced fluency and intonation all week.  In the afternoon students made their final presentations.  We will be giving "Academy Awards" for the best Readers' Theatre group and individual awards for individual performances at our next Awards Day.  Students really love these stories so they have loved doing all these culminating activities.

The thing is that first grade teachers don't HAVE to do this author study.  It's really a lot of extra work, but they choose to do it because they know the students really develop a love of reading and a love of narrative from these books that they so naturally relate.  It makes your heart leap when the students beg to get a Kevin Henkes book during independent reading and work so hard to say every single word -with expression! - even when the book is above their reading level or when they search the vocabulary board to find a Kevin Henkes word they can use in their writing.

It makes MY heart leap when I see a group of teachers work together so tirelessly to make something happen for their students, just so they will love reading!

Opinion Writing

For our final Kindergarten Writing Unit, we finished with Opinion Writing using Lucy Calkins' new writing lessons. The depth in the lessons really stretched our thinking and our delivery.   We have been thrilled with the level of writing the children have been able to produce.  It is certainly true that when the level of instruction improves, so does the level of writing!  These are a couple of examples of the children's work.

The first one comes from Levi who was super excited that he was able to use one of our vocabulary words, private, in his writing!  His opinion is that he should be able to go to the bathroom in private - without his baby brother opening the door on him! He gives the reader a little story when he says that his brother put his hand in the toilet water. He even gives the reader a solution for fixing his problem on the final page!

 I want to be private when I go to the bathroom because my baby brother

opens the door on me!  One time my baby brother broke into the

bathroom and stuck his hand in the toilet water!

Yay! My baby brother is not broken in the bathroom.  I am away (from him).

1.Put him in his bed. 2. Walk away. 3. Go to the bathroom!  Thank you for listening.  Love, Levi

Ana decided to write her letter to a large audience - the people at the beach.  She begins with a story about going to the beach with a group of family and friends. She thinks they should quit going to the beach because they could get sun burned, even when they wear sun screen.  She gives some compelling reasons for skipping the beach and taking the chance of a sun burn such as getting sick, missing vacation and having to put ice on your back.  Her delightful pictures and speech bubbles give plenty of extra detail.  Pretty good argument Ana!

Dear people that go to the beach,

I think people shouldn't go to any beach anymore because you can get really bad sun burn  because...

 

Because one day I and Mommy and her friend Amber and Laura (were) all at the beach and my sister got sun burned.

 

Even when you got sun screen you can get sun burned because you can get sweaty. If you get really sweaty you can get sick. 

 

Then you'll have to go home and you will miss all of the vacation.

Then you're going to have to stay home having ice on your back.

The children wrote letters to their families, many asking for a new pet.  We so convinced the children that they could change the world that Paige was quite distraught when her letter for a new puppy did not produce the desired result!  Other children took on bigger topics such as Jehan who wrote to his neighbors trying to convince them not to pollute the pond near his house because it is making the fish sick and Finn who wrote the Chinese government about his concern that they are taking sharks' fins for medicinal purposes! Nazar and Finn had quite the discussion as Finn wrote to try to save the sharks and Nazar took the opposite argument trying to get rid of sharks based on a shark attack he had witnessed.

To celebrate, our kinder class met with a 1st grade class.  We paired each kinder partner with a first grader.  We shared our persuasive letters and they shared their narrative stories. Each partner pair practiced giving compliments and we ended with cookies and juice.  I think it was a relationship that will continue because it gave both groups an authentic audience for their work.    The most exciting part for me is that we will be looping up with this group of children to first grade.  Can you imagine what this group will be able to produce next year when we get to this unit?  Can't wait!

Morning Work

We are always looking for good morning work.  The trick is to get something meaningful to the students but that takes very little prep.  Since we came back from the winter holidays, we have been using an assignment that is working very well for us.  We put one vocabulary word on the board and one spelling word.  We have been struggling with our children starting sentences with capitals and remembering to put the ending punctuation so we wrote a rubric that included writing the date correctly (the idea is that if they have to write the date every morning they are more likely to remember how to spell the months!), writing a sentence with the spelling word (caps and punctuation count) and the word must be spelled correctly, and writing a sentence and picture with one of the words.  Both the spelling words and vocabulary words are part of the Skills assessment at the end of the week.  We give the children 15 minutes after the bell rings to unpack, change out their book-in-a-bag while the school's news show, WCCE, is on.  We also pledge and sing the Star Spangled Banner during that time.  We grade the spiral bound notebooks intermittently to keep the children interested.  Some days we actually ask the students to bring their notebooks to the carpet and call on students to show the others what they have written and drawn.  All in all, it's pretty satisfying morning work!

Kevin Henkes Characters and Charts

 We have read all of Kevin Henkes' "mouse"  books.  We used the books to study his characters.  First, with Wemberly, we worked with a partner to think of a single word that described worried Wemberly.  Then for Wendell and Sheila Rae and Louise we worked with partners and came up with a word to describe each character and then wrote our evidence - where in the text the character had demonstrated that quality.

 

 After several days of describing characters, we decided to see if we could come up with the word that Kevin Henkes used to describe each character.  The Kevin Henkes word is in red on the right.  The words that we came up with are in green.

 

Finally we decided which character was our favorite.  On one side of an index card we drew a picture of our favorite character and on the other side we wrote the reason that the character was our favorite.  As you can see Owen was our favorite, but Lilly came in a close second!

 

We also learned about Kevin Henkes' life so we could figure out how his life had affected his writing.  Students shared the most interesting thing they had learned about Henkes from their homework.

 All of this background helped us talk across the books - our favorite book, favorite character, which book we thought was Kevin Henkes' most important to first graders...  To have a book talk, we had to learn about Accountable Talk - how to wait for the silence to speak, how to make sure that everyone got a turn, how to disagree politely, how to listen and build on what others said.  We made the chart below of phrases to help us continue the conversation.

Narrative: Is this really Kindergarten?

I have been watching a series of lessons on narrative writing in a Kindergarten classroom that have just blown me away!  Below is an example of one student's narrative story.  She has worked on this one story for a couple of weeks - an accomplishment itself for such a young writer! The red indicates where she used a red pen to edit her story.

It was a really chilly (red pen edited from the word cold) in my glass room.  I was freezing. Brrrrr.

Mom didn't know what was wrong with Shadow. Shadow was eating.  Hmmmm.  Shadow was eating - crunch - mulch with germs in there.  I was frightened.  I screamed on top of my lungs, "MOM!"

I didn't know what to do.  Ahaaaaaa.  Mom got an idea.  Mom went outside - creak - and mom took my hula hoop - chch - and shook the hula hoop at Shadow and Shadow ran away from the mulch.  Shadow is a yellow lab.

Make sure you watch your dog if you have mulch because maybe your dog will eat your mulch up.  I hope you learned a lesson.

I hope you can see all the lessons that were taught that are evidenced in this student's work.  First of all, children were taught to think of a "story" with a main character, a setting and then a problem and a solution  Then they learned to think through the beginning, middle, and end of their story by telling the story over their fingers (a Lucy Calkins technique).  They started with the characters and the setting in the beginning of their story, as you can clearly see in this work (Shadow is the main character and the author is in her glass room - the Florida Room on the back of her house.)  The students then thought about a problem with the main character and finally a solution.  After they had written the beginning, middle and end, they were taught to develop a closing for the story instead of the typical kindergarten closing of "The End."  This work clearly shows that closing by telling the reading to watch dogs eating mulch and hoping the reader learned a lesson!  Students were taught to make sure that their pictures matched their words and in these pictures the student has even labeled  much of her work. 

But this teacher took it even further.  This is kindergarten and this child is using a red pen to edit her work!  Oh my!  One of the extension lessons was about choosing extraordinary words to replace ordinary words ( a vocabulary in synonyms!)  This was actually a series of lessons where students chose words and then brainstormed some extraordinary words they could use in small groups.  This work was transferred to a word wall that students were taught to use.

The teacher also took a group of six of her top flyers and taught them to use the Thesaurus on the Microsoft Word program so that as she taught the class to replace words using their own imaginations and the word wall, she taught this small group to replace words using the Thesaurus - which is what this student did with the word "cold" changing it to chilly.  She set up six laptops at the back of the room for these students to use.  This is a skill that these students will use for the rest of their writing careers!

The next series of lessons were on writing craft, onomatopoeia.  You can easily see how this child was able to add in these sound words with her red pen!

To continually assess the work the teacher used a rubric as she worked through each part of the narrative standard. She worked with the students to write each element, adding them one at a time, deciding with the students what would be a 1-2-3 for each part of the rubric. (S on the rebric stands for strategies which were the extention lessons.)

The children self-assessed by dropping a popsicle stick in one of the 1-2-3 buckets at the end of each element lesson.  The amazing thing is that as they dropped the popsicle stick in a 1 or 2 most of them were each able to talk about what they needed to move their stick to the next number point.

What is astounding about this unit of work is that the teacher had 18 of her 35 students exceed the class rubric (which far exceeded the kindergarten standard for narrative writing) by forming a story with a beginning, middle and end and by editing their work to include both extraordinary words and onomatopoeia!  She actually pushed her student well past the standard simply because she had so many students ready for the enrichment! WOW!

Update:  I had a very angry e-mail from a reader after this post that told me to quit posting writing that obviously a parent had done!  I had to laugh, realizing how little some teachers expect from their kindergartners!

First of the Year Kindergarten Bulletin Boards

Nursery Rhymes are a popular bulletin board for the first standard-based bulletin board in Kindergarten.  The board to the left includes a delightful illustration of the beginning, middle and end of the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty which helps a student begin to see that even very short stories have beginnings, middles, and ends.  It is amazing the detail that some kindergartners can already put into their pictures! This board also includes a worksheet where students have to draw some of the vocabulary words in the rhyme such as wall, King, men, horse.  It also includes a rhyming activity where students have to draw a rhyming word for some of the words that the students have been working with such as drawing a picture of a word that rhymes with wall (ball). 

This board on the right also focuses on the nursery rhymes that are part of our early learning but in this case the entire focus of the board is phonological awareness - the rhyming activites that are being taught through the rhymes.  For instance, the rhyme Hickory Dickory Dock includes the rhymes hickory-dickory, dock-clock, and one-run.  The board shows several rhyming activities such as listing words that are in the -ock family, being given a picture and selecting or cutting out another picture that rhymes with the pictured word.  Rhyming is such a fundamental skill because it is so hard for students to move forward if they cannot hear rhyming at the end of words!

Mrs. Roberts also features work with Nursery Rhymes on her bulletin board.  Her board includes several activites, also with rhyming words but the activity that is unique is her work is with the SmartBoard to teach rhming with the nursery rhymes.  Bet the children are mesmerized!

This board is all about "name" activites including combining the work we do in nursery rhymes to teach phonological awareness by using  a child's name.  We know that there is no more important word to a child than his own name so the board shows how you can substitute the class.  Jane and Henry went up a hill...It also shows a list of the words that the class discovered that also start with the same sound as a student's name and that student's homework when children were asked to bring in items from home that started like their name.  The final activity includes a list of the children's names in the class where the children have counted/ clapped the syllables that they can hear in each name. 

 

The standard-based bulletin board below focuses on the drawings and words that are the final activity of "Star Names". After the children have done many acitivites that emphasize the beginning sound of the name of a single star student for the day, each child is asked to draw a picture of the star student. The teacher models the child's name as the class follows and then draws a picture of the student. The students begin with simple pictures and then more elaborate pictures that begin to fill up the white space and then finally stories about the student. As the drawings become more sophisticated, so do the words, beginning with the child's name and then moving to labels, sentences and then stories. This bulletin board displays the many levels of entering kindergartners, from a simple, almost unidentifiable picture with mock letters and scribbles to a sophisticated drawing with a phonetic sentence.

Mrs. Mallon and Mrs. Dillard's bulletin board focuses on the beginning stories that our youngest authors write in Writers' Workshop, showing four different levels of writing from simple drawings to  detailed drawings with simple phonetic sentences. What makes this board interesting is the way that the teachers introduce writing to their class by telling the students to first imagine a story with a beginning, middle, and end over three pages before they begin writing and then to tell their stories through drawings and words. It is amazing what these youngest writers have to say and what they can already write!

 

Each of the bulletin boards above provides a window into the important instruction that goes on inside kindergarten classrooms so early in the school year.  Can't wait to see how these boards unfold in the months to come.

Vocabulary - Mop Top

Several years ago, after we read the work of Beck and McKeown, a group of Kindergarten teachers at Chets Creek decided to write our own vocabulary study. We looked at books that we were using for oral retelling after coming back from studying with Lucy Calkins at Teachers' College in NYC. We selected the best of those books and then choose 6 words for each book - 4 words that were actually used in the book and 2 words that were implied. We then wrote vocabulary activities for each of the books. We have used and edited the vocabulary for about 4 years now. Not only do the teachers love the work, but the children clearly are using the vocabulary in their oral speaking and in their writing! The bulletin board above by Maria Mallon and Cheryl Dillard, shows how their kindergarten class has incorporated the vocabulary unit into their curriculum. This board shows activities around one of our "Star Books," Mop Top.

"Vocabulary Jeopardy," as illustrated above, is a game played in the classroom as children learn new words with each new book. The teacher asks the question and the children have to name the word. It's a fun way to practice definitions.

The book above is an example of a child that has incorporated the vocabulary that the class has been learning into her writing. She has written a pattern book called, "What makes you thrilled?" This book clearly shows that she understands the word!

The activity above is an example of one completed by each individual child. This concept map is words and pictures for the word thrilled. The activity above shows four of the words from the story, Mop Top, illustrated by a kindergartner - stumbled, floppy, soaring, thrilled. This activity has been used as an activity so students could show their understanding of the words but also could be used as an assessment.

Humane Society Visits

Today Meagan from the Jacksonville Humane Society visited Chets Creek kindergartners. The children learned about what dogs need, about the Humane Society in general and about how to approach a dog that they do not know. Many of the kindergarten classes are collecting cat and dog food, animal bowls, brushes and blankets to donate to the Humane Society as part of their holiday service project. Many of the children returned to class and wrote about what they had learned today from this shared experience.

I pet the dog.

He was soft.

I learned that he

did tricks.

The dog was happy.

I was eager to see

the dog do tricks.

Abigail's picture matches her words as it shows the children in line waiting to pet Noodles, the Humane Society dog, at the end of the assembly. You will notice that Abigail also got a sticker for using the word "eager" which is a vocabulary word from our "Star Vocabulary" curriculum!

October's Book-of-the-Month: Grace for President

October's Book-of-the Month is the delightful Grace for President. Books-a-million describes the book in this way:

"Where are the girls?" When Grace's teacher reveals that the United States has never had a female president, Grace decides to be the first. And she immediately starts off her political career as a candidate in the school's mock election. But soon, she realizes that she has entered a tough race. Her popular opponent claims to be the "best man for the job"--and seems to have captured all the male votes--while Grace concentrates on being the best person . In this timely story, author Kelly DiPucchio not only gives readers a fun introduction to the American electoral system, but also teaches them the value of hard work, courage, and independent thought--and offers an inspiring example of how to choose our leaders.

Principal Susan Phillips always uses each new book-of-the-month to teach the faculty a new strategy. This month it was another new vocabulary strategy, since we recognize the importance of vocabulary on comprehension. As always, she treats the teachers like her class of students so they can actually experience the strategy themselves. What a perfect time of the year for us to predict the words that we thought we might encounter in this book about elections. After brainstorming a list of words, we categorized the words by putting like words together and then choosing a title for each category, in the same way that we will ask our students to do.

After teachers took part in the strategy work with their grade level team, they were enthralled and entertained with Susan's rendition of Grace for President. Susan was a kindergarten teacher so she does a truly delightful read aloud! Now this is a book that even Obama and McCain would enjoy!

Mem Fox Vocabulary

Standard-based bulletin boards are up this week and Meredy Mackiewicz showed the work her class has been doing with the America's Choice Mem Fox Vocabulary Study.

From Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge the students worked on the words admire, precious, errand, memory, favorite, and speckled. One of the culminating activities for this group of words was to give each child one of the words and ask them to use the word in a sentence and then draw a picture of the sentence on the back of the paper. The sentence/ pictures for each word were grouped together and hung as mobiles in the room. In the bulletin board example the child wrote the sentence, I saw a speckled fish with dots.

In Possum Magic the children studied adventure, nibble, invisible, visible, expectantly, and miserable. Each student was given one of the words and asked to write examples in their Australian shaped word web. In the bulletin board example the student showed understanding of the word adventure by listing haunted house, climbing a mountain, going on a boat, and going on a roller coaster! Great adventures!


From Tough Borris, the first graders learned stern, scruffy, massive, fearless, sorrow and greedy. Each child was given a word and then asked to complete a word web of words that meant the same. On the example shown, the word was massive. The student showed she understood the word by adding big, heavy, large, enormous, jumbo size and 10,000 pounds to his web.




Koala Lou featured the words fling, spectator, preparations, exuberant, determined, and splendid. The photos show the children acting out the words.






As you can see, the children have studied sophisticated words through their study of Mem Fox books. The activities shown are the culminating activities to show that the children understand the vocabulary and how they were used in Mem Fox's books. The real understanding of course, will be if the students understand the words as they hear them in other books or in conversation and if they use the words in their writing.