Reading and Writing Routines

Reading

We began Reading Workshop with enthusiasm and dedication. I was thrilled to see how motivated the students were to choose books from our classroom library. Each student has his/her “book bin” filled with interesting books, a Reader’s Notebook to record books read and a Reader Response Journal for literature responses.  Our mini-lessons have focused on how the classroom library is organized, how to choose the “just right” book and why we choose certain books. We have also explored word analysis strategies and the importance of reading a variety of genres. Be sure to ask your child to explain the different genres to you. The students made bookmarks and enjoy reading on our rug squares and conferencing with me. 

We also finished our first read aloud called Donavan’s Word Jar. Here we are going on a Word Hunt around the school and recording interesting words in word jars in our Writer's Notebooks. We are finding fascinating words during Reading Workshop too and writing them on little pieces of paper for our own classroom word jar. In addition, we wrote our first whole class reader response entry to this read aloud. We learned the power of words and how they can change us! This inspired us to decorate Our Word Study Notebooks with lots and lots of words to help us prepare for a year of discovering patterns in words.

Writing

Writing Workshop began with the students reflecting on some memorable summer events. We decorated our Writer’s Notebook covers and are sharing them with our classmates as our first star student activity. The students also wrote bio-poems about themselves. We published and shared as a class and they are hanging up in our room. It was a fun way to get to know each other better.