As you probably heard, I was out yesterday. I was at a workshop with a famous (as famous as such people get), literacy education author Sharon Taberski. It was a great day, full of new ideas and ways to teach reading and writing in first grade!

Anyhow, it was another nice day in Room 240 – here’s the lowdown:

After Independent Literacy Time and Morning Meeting, we had Reader’s Workshop. Today we looked at a book that we read on Monday by Kevin Henkes (one of my favorite kid’s writers) called Julius, Baby of the World. It’s a really cute book, especially for kid that have new or little brothers or sisters. We spent the Workshop today looking for what we call “lovely language” – words or phrases that are especially neat, novel, or great sounding. We made a list of them, and then the kids looked for lovely language in the books that they were reading independently. At the closing share of workshop, each kid shared one or two examples of lovely language that they found on their own.

After reading, we went straight on into Writer’s Workshop. We basically continued the concepts from Reader’s Workshop by looking at things around our room, including books, posters, and anything else for examples of lovely language to put in our Poetry Idea books. Then the kids went around the room looking at things in the room “with a poet’s eye,” which we practiced on Monday. They found things like “a ceiling like Oreo cookie ice cream (our ceiling is white with black flecks in it), a clock that is like a big cookie that tells time, islands in the globe that are like crumbs on a big blue counter, etc. They are very clever poets! We’ll use these fragments and bits of lovely language to craft poetry in the coming days.

When we wrapped up writing, we headed on down to the cafeteria and then out for recess (what a great day, weather-wise!!!!). When we got back in, we read some more of the Jigsaw Jones book that the kids began with the sub yesterday. At noon, we walked upstairs to the art room for class with Mr. Fairbanks.

When we got back to our room, we flip-flopped Science Lab and Math Workshop to do Science Lab first. We are working on Electricity, and the kids spent quite a long time experimenting with a battery, a wire, and a small light bulb, trying to figure out how to get the bulb to light. They were so into it, and so excited about it, that I couldn’t stop them. We discussed what they discovered, and then went back to do some more experimenting. By the time we got to a good stopping point, it was time to go home – we’ll have to do double math tomorrow, I guess!