A Visit from Auntie Claus

Several years ago Auntie Claus was the December Book-of-the-Month. Thus was born a tradition of our Principal, Susan Phillips, dressing up like the character, Auntie Claus, and reading to all of the 1300 children in the school. She takes a different grade level (about 200 children at a time) each hour all day long and reads holiday books that are age appropriate, all the time pretending to be Santa's sister who has been left in charge of the school for the day. The children love it. The teachers love it. After the book is read, all of the Resource teachers, dressed as elves, serve cookies and chocolate milk. It really is one of those very simple traditions that makes a school special. How wonderful to have a school that is full of holiday traditions!

Holiday Book Exchange

Today we had our annual Holiday Book Exchange. Any staff member at school can sign up to participate. This year's event was hosted by Maria Mallon and Cheryl Dillard in their first grade Winter Wonderland. Each person brings a holiday read aloud to the table. Some of the books come wrapped, some in holiday gift bags and some easy to see without wrapping. The Reading Council brings tasty treats and each person draws a number. Then, beginning with #1 each person selects a book. Susan Phillips, our Principal, makes the rules and calls the numbers, as each teacher in turn selects a book. The twist is that you can choose to steal a book instead of selecting a new book and once a book has been stolen three times, it is "dead" and belongs to the person that has it. It's a fun way to choose books and just enjoy each other's company. The goal really is to add to each person's holiday readalouds and to leave the morning with a new book that you don't have! What a great way to start a day ...and a merry time was had by all!

My Life as a First Grader

Back in the day - children were not required to go to Kindergarten, but my mom worked so I was enrolled in a small private Kindergarten where I mostly remember playing in the sandbox. However, going to "real" school was a big deal and I was enrolled in Royall Elementary School in Florence, SC on that first day of first grade with a little fear and lots of anticipation. My teacher was Mrs. Sharp and she ruled with an iron hand. She was older, stern and had a ruddy complexion. I don't remember that she ever smiled. I was deathly afraid of her. I vividly remember the day in first grade as we opened our reading books to the "adventures" of Dick, Jane and Sally. I did not know the word "see" and called the word "look". Mrs. Sharp was furious, furious, furious (as I remember it!) and pulled me by the ear. I was so afraid that she was going to make me wear the baby cap (which was a baby blue crocheted cap with a satin bow she made the "bad" boys wear to lunch) that I was practically trembling. I was a timid student with no self confidence. My mother had never read to me. I don't think she knew that is what she was suppose to do so I was not particularly well prepared for the academic pursuits of first grade. I was very fortunate the next year to have a second grade teacher, Mrs. Gilmore, that changed my life by believing in me. She was the reason that I later became a teacher. Right before I got married, my mother and I ran into Mrs. Sharp and she was actually delightful. She told my mom that I was such a sweet, well-behaved student! Really? She was actually pleasant and I remember walking away and being so surprised. That lesson has stuck with me all these years. When my students remember me I want it to be with a smile on my face!

I graduated from high school with most of the same students who sat with me in first grade. There was very little diversity in our little school. Schools in my southern town would not be integrated until my final years of high school. I knew nothing else so it would be years - when I became a teacher in my own hometown - before I really came to terms with what was actually happening in our southern segregated schools.

Life was safe in my little first grade world. I rode my bike to and from school. It was a couple of miles, across a main road. Many of my friends rode their bikes or walked to school and I can't ever remember any parent worrying, although remembering some of the things we did on the way home, maybe they should have! Even though my mom owned her own dancing school and worked every day, which was unusual for the times, I came home every day to my Granny who lived with us. I don't think there was anything like day care or Extended Day after school. All my friends went home to after-school snacks  and most of them went home to their stay-at-home moms. Divorce was not even an option in the times when I was a first grader.

I think life is much more complex for families today. Children spend larger amounts of time in the care of someone other than a family member. Parents, who mostly seem to be working these days, often come home tired. I know I did when I was a parent and I had a first grader while I was working full time. As a teacher now, I try to remember that my little first graders really have much more complex lives and the very things that excite us about their connectedness to the world also bother us because our children are exposed to so much more. In my years as a first grader we only had three television stations available, no cell phones or computers - hard to imagine - and rotary telephones with cords attached! Was it easier when we were just oblivious? I guess only time will tell....

Thanksgiving on Thursday

Many of our young readers are ready for their first chapter books - more words, fewer pictures - so we thought we would begin by reading aloud some of the first books in some of the series that they can choose such as the Magic Tree House series. By reading the first book in a series, the students can meet the characters and get a feel for the books to see if they might be interested in others in the series. We started by introducing the class to eight year old Jack and his seven year old sister Annie as they are transported to another time when they open a book in their magic tree house. We first read book #1, Dinosaurs Before Dark, which the children loved. We just couldn't resist adding book #27, Thanksgiving on Thursday right before the holiday. Of course, we realized that we might need to add a little additional background knowledge to this historical fiction when we asked them to guess who the characters might meet on this adventure and they guessed George Washington and Abe Lincoln! We did fill in with some traditional Thanksgiving books of the first celebration between chapters!

Not all of our little sprouts are quite ready for chapter books. We also have children that are beginning readers (and we are quite proud of them!) but they, of course, want to read the same books that some of their peers are reading. One of our little beginning readers chose a Magic Tree House chapter book to put in his daily reading book bin. I asked him if he was sure he could read all the words and he assured me that he had taken it home the night before and stayed up all night reading it and that it was really a GREAT book. When I asked him if he had trouble with any of the words, he replied rather sheepishly, "Well I did have trouble with this word." He opened the book to the first word on the very first page, "Jack"! I mean, really, you have to give him credit for desire!

We won't stop reading, of course, because he can understand stories well above what he is able to read independently, but we will encourage mom and dad to continue to feed his desire by reading to him at this higher level at the same time that he is reading to them from books that he really can read fluently and independently. I can't wait to hear him respond as he moves through adventures with mummies and knights and even travels with the astronauts to the moon!

A Last Look at Mem

We have completed our author study of Mem Fox but as standard-based bulletin boards went up last month, Maria Mallon and Cheryl Dillard's board displayed some of the work that was done during this unit. It's worth one last look!
Having children make connections to Mem Fox' books is one of the ways that we hope to have children connect to her work. We want our children to understand that good readers activate their own prior knowledge when reading a book and that they make connections to help them understand the setting or the character or the character's motivation and reactions of particular situations that they have encountered in their own lives. Associating an experience in a book with one that the child has actually lived, helps him understand the character and the stoy. The same is true for setting, characters, moods they have read about in other books. Making those connections to the new book helps them understand, predict, analyze what is happening in the new book. The student above shows that he has made a connection between Mem's Shoes from Grandpa and There Was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Bat. In this case the child recognizes that both are pattern books with rhyming text that add on. Understanding the structure of the book helps the student predict what will come next.
In the work above the student sequences the major events in the story Possum Magic. Not only does this require recall of basic information but the student is also determining the most important events in the story and summarizing them into a few short sentences - all strong components of comprehension!
In the final example, the student compares a story by Mem Fox with another story that he knows. This type of comparing and contrasting helps the student analyze what happens in both stories.

All of these activities are ways that students are taught to read across the books of the same author. Knowing more about Mem Fox and the type of books that she writes, where she gets her ideas, where she is from and what is important to her will add layers of comprehension to the student's experience with her books. Comparing and contrasting and making connections to other books will also help the student understand what is happening in these new books. All of the reading and writing in an author study is to teach our students to comprehend at a deeper level and to help our children mentor themselves to the author so that they are able to recognize and to duplicate some of Mem Fox' craft in their own work. Maybe we are watching the birth of a new Mem Fox right in our own classrooms!

The New and Improved Morning Message

For the first nine weeks Tracy and I have faithfully added a couple of sentences to our white board each morning as a morning message for the students to edit. We have concentrated this first nine weeks on capitals at the beginning of sentences, the capital I, capitals of names of people and places, ending punctuation, and spelling of high frequency words and the phonics skills we are studying. Although the children had gotten very good at editing the sentences, the rules didn't seem to be transferring into their writing. The very student who would find every period in the morning message would then begin a Writers' Workshop piece and not use a single ending punctuation!

So... we decided to try something different this second nine weeks. We decided to go right down the list of students and have each child in turn choose a piece of their own writing for the class to edit. The class would edit the first two sentences of the student's writing, just as we had the morning message. The difference would be that the student who was having his piece edited by the class would be more vested in the process and we would begin to show the students what we expect when we ask them to work with their writing partner and edit each other's work. We put the selected piece under the document camera and hit "freeze" which freezes the piece onto the white board. Then as students come up and edit the piece on the board, just as they did the morning message, the child with the chosen piece can make the same edits of his own paper. We also make sure that we point out all the great things that the student is doing so that they feel good about the process. So far this has seemed to be working. Two different students have changed the spelling of "wuz" to "was" in a new piece after having their papers edited by their peers and several have finally begun to use the capital I and one began a new piece for the first time with a capital. This editing practice does seem to be making the difference! It will be interesting to see how this new idea works over time!

Inferring

We started a new reading unit this week on the comprehension strategy of inferring. After introducing the idea of what it is and how it helps good readers, Tracy selected a student and put a word on his back. The class could see the word but the chosen student could not. Tracy invited the class to give the chosen child hints so he could try to infer what the word might be. Nicholas got the first word on his back, "mad." The students gave several hints to Nicholas including situations that would make him mad, the synonym "happy," and Shawn even showed Nic his best mad face (on the right)! After several hints, Nic guessed the word. Tracy discussed with the children that it is the same way that good readers infer when they are reading. They have a word or words in the book. They take their own schema (background knowledge) which were represented by the "hints" and put those two together to come to a new understanding. In this case the understanding is the word!

Tan got the second word, "sad." He, of course, couldn't see the word and had to guess the word on his back from the hints that were given by the rest of the class. Once again the students gave him several situations that might make him sad. Jacob did a great imitation of crying and another student gave him a synonym.

 Tan soon guessed the word. Once again Tracy went through the explanation of how the students had used the hints to figure out the word.

The students thoroughly enjoyed this lesson on inferring and seemed to get the idea that the author might not always give them all the information, but instead might just give them hints so they could figure out what had happened. We'll see how the rest of the week goes with this new and complex comprehension strategy.