May the Fourth Be With You

It is the start of teacher appreciation month at our school and it is also Star Wars day - May 4th - so all of our doors and hallways are decorated beautifully for the occasion. Take a look.

Thank you for the great decorations and breakfast. It was a great way to start the day!

Thanks, Ms. Gina and Ms. Sarah for such a great door decoration!

Soil Samples

We took a close look at our soil samples this week. We were surprised to see how many different kinds of soil there are in the world. Thanks for sending in samples from your yard - you can still send in samples if you would like. We will be doing experiments on our samples throughout the next 2 weeks.

Comparing Soil Colors

Is it brown, black, gray, red, greenish-gray, etc.?

Comparing Soil Textures

Is it soft, hard, sticky, clay-like, gritty, rocky, sandy, etc.?

Clementine

We are currently reading the book, Clementine by Sara Pennypacker, aloud. We love it. It is both very funny and very sweet at the same time. Here is a brief description of the book from Sara Pennypacker's website:

Clementine

In this first book of the series, Clementine tries to help out her friend Margaret, but ends up in a lot of trouble for it. Things get worse each day of the week, until finally she's worried that Margaret is right: Clementine's parents might consider her "the hard one" in the family. They're up to something mysterious...are they thinking they'd be better off if they only had her little vegetable-named brother..."the easy one"?

We have had some great laughs and great discussions while reading this book. We have been learning about understanding what we are reading and taking our thinking a little deeper. This book does just that. We had lots of questions as we read and needed to learn a knew word to describe how Clementine felt most of the time in the book - misunderstood. Clementine has attention issues which most first graders can relate to. As Clementine always says, she is paying attention - just not to the things that the adults around her think are important. I love this book as an adult and would recommend it to you. It is similar to Disney movies in how it puts in a few lines that only adults will understand.

There are more books in this series so I highly recommend them as a family read aloud. The whole family will enjoy them. The author has just started a new series about a boy in Clementine's class named Waylon. Again I highly recommend both of these series for family read alouds. One reviewer called these books "alternately laugh-aloud funny and melt-your-heart tender" and I completely agree.

Obsession with Chapter Books

One of the greatest challenges of teaching first grade is the "chapter book" issue. Every child in every first grade class wants to be able to read chapter books. They can be rather obsessed with this goal. They feel like they aren't really readers until they can read chapter books. As a result, there are often some rather sad children when they realize that it can take a while to develop all of the skills necessary to read chapter books.

 As some students in the crew begin to be able to read chapter books this whole issue becomes magnified. We have lots of talks about how babies don't all learn to walk on the same day or kids don't all learn to ride a two-wheel bike the same day and this helps some. But if you are the child still waiting to read chapter books and it seems likes everyone else is already there it can be a bit discouraging.

Because we now have more a little bit more than half of our crew reading chapter books, I have to work this "we all learn at different times" angle really hard. We talk about showing empathy to others if we can read chapter books and they aren't ready yet. We find books that we can all read and love so everyone can join in. This stretch of time can be difficult for those who aren't yet reading chapter books.

You can help by offering to read some of those chapter books aloud to your child if this is an issue at your house. You can reinforce that everyone will be reading chapter books soon and that it will be worth the wait and that the best way to "get there" is to practice and practice. Some books that are "just right" for everyone in the crew and are great fun to read are the Elephant and Piggie series and the Fly Guy series. Great book series to choose for read aloud at bedtime are Gooney Bird Greene, Ready Freddy, Clementine, Roscoe Riley and Marty Maguire.

We will all reach that special "chapter book moment" but we may need to practice empathy (as givers and receivers) as we all work to get there.