Literacy on Thursday

This is my sister and I. As I told my class today, although we do not look like each other we are still sisters because my family is glued together with a special type of glue called love.

Thursday I sure was busy. I am still dragging a bit because of this awful cold that I have come down with but I have been wearing some really crazy tights in the hopes that they will at least give the student’s the vibe that I have lots of energy even when I am not showing it. I always liked acting as a kid, and I have found that much of teaching is acting. At any rate, I started my day off with sharing my experiences coming from a family with an adopted member. We have some students in our classroom that are adopted from different countries and that do not look like their other family members. We decided to address this and inform our students that families are different. I talked a little bit about my own family and I think the children enjoyed hearing a little about myself. After our meeting the children went to gym and music and came back in time to have a snack. After snack we had reading time where some students enjoyed the listening center, while others read in guided reading groups, worked on their site words, or just sat quietly and read. I lead a group of first grade boys that read two stories together and then read through all their site words and copied the spelling of some. Before I knew it we were off to lunch. Our afternoon was a lot of fun. I read the children a story called, When Sofie Gets Angry, Really, Really, Angry by Molly Bang. We had a little discussion about our own experiences of getting mad and how we calmed down. I had the children share some of their experiences with emotions and then I turned them loose to write and draw about it. I encouraged them to show an emotion using their art skills. I pointed out that when Sofie was really mad, the illustrator used a lot of red and other warm colors, but as she starts to become happy again calm and peaceful blues and greens surround her. The children had fun with this exercise and then we went into math time. For math we had the children think about the story we read yesterday Rooster’s Off to See the World by Eric Carle, and write how many animals there were in the whole story. They had to draw pictures of one rooster, two cats, three turtles, and so one to show how they come up with 15 total animals in the story.