We started the day off with a one-word notecard. I love this exercise. It is quite simple. On one side of a notecard the students write a word. On the other side of the card they write why they picked the word. Today I had the students write how they felt this morning as they walked into the room. Students picked words liked excited, happy, nervous, tired, awesome, and so many others. Then on the other side of the care the students did a great job of explaining why they felt this way. When the students were done, they came to the rocking chair to share. I was amazed at how many students were willing to share. I think it takes a lot of courage to share writing.
Then we got to start our first read aloud. The book we are starting the year with is called Half a Chance by Cynthia Lord.
I love Cynthia Lord. She is an amazingly descriptive writing. After going through a book walk (look at the front cover, back cover, front jacket, back jacket and read the first few pages) the class really seemed to be excited about the book. I cannot wait to get deeper into this book with the class. I love reading aloud. It is one of my favorite parts of the day. One reason the experience is so enjoyable is I get to share books with students that they may not have thought about reading on their own. If they like the read aloud book, then I can find other books that make hook them into reading.
We also got to start writing in our Writer's Notebook. Ms. Cavallaro and I started to make a list of "Things We Like to Talk About" in front of the class. We put things on our lists like family members, sports we love (we found out Ms. Cavallaro played lacrosse), places we love, things we love and so much more. As we kept adding to our lists and adding to our lists, the class started to create their own lists. The lists grew and grew (some filled a whole page and had to work on the back) as the class kept calling out ideas and we added ideas to our own list. At the end of all this work we had the class cross out the word "Talk" at the top of their page and change it to "Write."
Students love to tell me they have nothing to write about when it is time to write. I don't buy it. Just come in and listen to students run up to share stories. It happens each morning. Our students love to share about themselves. When writing time comes, suddenly their ideas disappear. We are going to work on helping students find the ideas that they already have to create great pieces of writing. If your students are working on their writing at home and they get a case of writer's block, have them look back to this page in their writer's notebook. Hopefully something on the list will spark a great story.
I hope you are all having a wonderful week. I am out for the night.
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