In one of my teacher-librarian courses this past summer I learned about a site called Shelfari, which allows you to keep track of what you are reading. I’ve started a shelf with the books we have read this week, and hopefully the students can help me keep it updated!
Mercy Watson
I have been meaning to read this book for ages and just haven’t gotten around to it, so I decided to choose it as our first class read-aloud. Mercy is a pig with personality! She lives with Mr. & Mrs. Watson and loves hot buttered toast. When she climbs into bed with Mr. & Mrs. Watson and the floor starts to break, she goes in search of toast, but they think she is rescuing them. Mercy peers through the neighbour’s windows, waking them up, and adventure ensues!
This is a great beginning chapter book, there are lots of pictures and the chapters are short. I am hoping students will seek out other books in the series when we visit the library today. If you want to see more visit http://www.mercywatson.com
What we’re reading… poems, poems, and more poems!
We have started a unit on poetry, which the students are loving! I found some great books at the McGill library, I actually walked out with a stack, far more than would fit in my book bag! A few favourite books so far are “Take Me Out of the Bathtub” by Alan Katz , the “You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You” series by Mary Ann Hoberman, “My Hippo Has the Hiccups” by Kenn Nesbitt, and of course, all the Shel Silverstein books.
We wrote a class poem which we shared at the volunteer tea this afternoon. It was inspired by “You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You”, but instead of only two voices, we had two groups of voices. We brainstormed a list of all the things the parents do for our school, then used those ideas to write our poem. We made sure to put in lots of tasty words, and the class had fun reading them with expression!
If you’d like to explore creating your own poetry, the Magnetic Poetry site has a fun tool. I made a nonsense poem, you can read it here!
The Name Jar
On Friday we read “The Name Jar” by Yangsook Choi. It is about Unhei who moves to the United States from Korea. When she starts school she is worried that the other students will laugh at her name, or not be able to pronounce it, so she says she hasn’t chosen a name yet. The students in her class are helpful, creating a name jar filled with suggestions for possible names. In the end Unhei decides her own name fits her best!
Reading this book got me thinking about all the interesting names we have in our class, so I decided we should do some writing about our own names. On Friday, students brought home a yellow page for homework. Their job it to find out about how they got their name, it’s meaning, the language it is from, and if they are named after someone. We will be creating some poetry around our names this week, so make sure your child brings the homework back to school!
Reader’s Theatre Accomplished!
The students did a great job today on their Reader’s Theatre performance! We had several parents in the audience, as well as Division 9 in the morning and Division 10 in the afternoon. I think everyone enjoyed these silly takes on classic fairy tales. If you weren’t able to make it, but would like to see the video, please let me know and I will send you a copy.