Narrative Writing

We moved on from practicing opinion piece writings and now have moved to narrative writing. When we first practiced narratives, we created a chart together as to what items needed to be in a narrative. Once we came up with the list, we then orally told stories that could easily be written down as a narrative, but instead we just practiced including all of the pieces when speaking, as well as keeping the stories to 3-4 sentences.


Once we practiced and modeled several narratives, we then  moved on to writing a class narrative about a field trip we took to McCutcheon High School for their Ag Day. I emphasized four important words in order to keep our writing to the point and flowing in the correct order without getting off track. The words we used were "First, Next, Then and Finally". We wrote the piece together recalling our field trip.


After we wrote our piece together, we practiced illustrating each portion of our writing next to each of those four important words. When the students begin doing these steps independently, we will flip flop the way we did this and I will have them first illustrate a story by using the page below and drawing what happened first, next, then and last. We will then write the narrative using their illustrations to help recall the story in order and including the other important pieces of a narrative!

New Behavior Chart!

 

I realized I haven't posted about our new behavior chart. I used to have a system where the students all started out swimming in the ocean as fish and then if they made a poor choice they would move their fish to the 5, 10, 15 and Sea Snake (aka the office and phone call home). This really worked great for a few years until I realized all I was doing was punishing students for not making good choices, but what about all of those students who were making the RIGHT choices? Sooooo, in comes the new behavior chart. The chart starts off with every students clip in the middle green "Ready to Learn at the Beach" choice. Moving down the chart the parts are yellow-"Sink or Swim", orange-"Wipe Out" and red-"Shark Tank". Going up the chart they are purple-"Surf's Up", pink-"Riding the Wave" and the highest one is blue-"Top Surfer". Throughout the day students have the opportunity to get "caught" making good choices for themselves or even helping out others and can move their clip up. On the flip side, if they are not making the best choices the clip can be moved down. Moving the clip down results in 5 minutes, 10 minutes and 15 minutes from recess. If a student ends on the red/Shark Tank, he/she has a red note to take home that explains what choices were made and needs to be signed and returned the following day. Moving up the chart is the BEST! If at the end of the day the student ends up on purple they earn a Brownie Buck (mini-economy system), pink a Brownie Buck and a skittle/M&M (whatever is in the jar on my desk) and if they end up as the Top Surfer on blue they earn a Brownie Buck and a automatic trip to the class treasure box! I just LOVE to see the kids working so very hard to earn their way back up the chart, even if they make a poor choice at some point in the day they can earn their way back up!

Weather Kids

Starting off our weather unit this week, we split up into four groups (we have 4 windows in our classroom) and became weather kids for our classroom! Everyday for the next two weeks before spring break we are filling out a weather graph...sunny, rainy, windy, foggy, overcast/cloudy and snowy.....we will see which type of weather we had the most and least of in those two weeks!

We have new table names to go along with our weather unit! We have the sunny table, cloudy table, snowy table, stormy table, raindrop table and the partly cloudy/partly sunny table (depending on which side you are on).

Goofing Around!

After reading allllll of the Dr. Seuss books we did this week, we picked three of our favorite characters and made photo props to become those characters in a photo opportunity with our books and our character friends. Whew...what a fun week we had! And the pictures turned out ADORABLE.

Truffala Trees, Yes Please!

To finish our study of the fabulous author Dr. Seuss this week, we made Truffala tree's using shaving cream, glue and paint. We first cut the grass and the tree trunk and glued them onto the pretty blue sky. Next came the best part, we got messy with our hands! I have two favorite quotes from this lesson...."Mrs. Brown, we get to use our hands?!?! Yayyyy!" and "What fun would it even be if we didn't get to use our hands?" These kids crack me up! I'm glad I was able to bring a little bit of messy joy to their lives today....first it was Justin Bieber and now messy painting. How will I ever top this week?

Poem--Come Skating

Justin Bieber as a Mini-Lesson!

During our first Daily 5 mini-lesson this week we practiced the strategy "Visualize/Make a Mental Image" while listening to Justin Bieber read The Cat in the Hat. After a few minutes into the story we talked about what they were visualizing in their mind while listening to the story. I had not turned the ENO Board on, so they did not know who was reading the story and/or what the story looked like. They had wonderful explanations as to what they were visualizing. I then turned the board on and the class saw it was Justin Bieber. They were glued to the screen up until the very end!

Fairy Tale Fun!

Once upon a time, a kindergarten class filled with ten princes and twelve princesses, studied fairy tales for an entire week. They learned a lot, wrote their own fairy tale and can retell the elements that are found in just about every fairy tale. This class worked so very hard that they earned their own magic wands by the end of the week. The wands however did not have any magic, until their fairy god teacher took some magic fairy dust and sprinkled it upon each child's wand to make it magical! The students in the class all lived happily ever after! THE END :)

Poem of the Week--The Elephant Goes Like this Like that!

President Tree Maps

At the end of our study last week over two very important presidents in history, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln we completed a tree map for both men. The class did an excellent job with this review activity in remembering many important facts about each former President! As we filled the forms on the ENO Board, each student filled one out as well!

Poem of the Week--My Little Sister