Fairy tales, Friendship and Middle School Leaders

What fun we had in the library this week. We  continued reading and sharing Fairy Tales in First grade. We shared the story of Rumplestiltskin by Jonathon Langley.  Wow! I was so impressed, my friends were making text to text connections and text to self connections, throughout our discussion of this story. We followed the our anchor chart to determine weather or not our story was truly a fairy tale or not, you will be happy to know that it is indeed a fairy tale. Then we determined that several other stories we have recently read were not fairy tales.

In Kindergarten we continued our Author study on Mo Willems. We finished up the Knuffle Bunny stories with Knuffle Bunny Free. We also, shared Leonardo the Terrible Monster, which is a wonderful story about friendship.

On Friday we had a special fun filled day of character education. We had student leaders from the middle school share, prepared lessons for our students. We shared lessons on traits like fairness, trustworthiness, responsibility, caring, citizenship and respect.

Here are 2 middle school leaders sharing the story A Sick Day For Amos McGee by Philip C. Stead
Which is a wonderful story Amos McGee, a friendly zookeeper, always made time to visit his good friends: the elephant, the tortoise, the penguin, the rhinoceros, and the owl.
But one day - "Ah-choo!" - he woke up with the sniffles and the sneezes. Though he didn't make it into the zoo that day, he did receive some unexpected guests.

 

We then created an anchor chart about being a good friend. See it here...

 

 

My current book choice is The Apartment by Greg Baxter. It is a story about the day in the life of a protagonist as he makes his way across an unnamed European city in search of an apartment. It reads like poetry. I am hanging on every word.  

 

As I stated last week I am working on the reading challenge, for the rest of the winter. The students will need to read 20 books between now and Spring break. This is going to be fun.

I am getting excited already. We will be calling it our WINTER READATHON!!!  

A challenge from me to my students.

I will also have a challenge for adults. I think you will be happy with this challenge. I look forward to encouraging and promoting reading in 2014.

I also, wanted to let you all know that Sgt. Hinkle sent a letter from Afghanistan. It arrived just today and I haven't had a chance to share it with the kiddo's just yet but I am so excited to share it.   It was a community effort and this letter is meant for all of those that had a role to play in executing the care packages that went out this fall. I will be framing it and hanging it in the library, I will take a photo after I share it with my classes.

I also, have signed up with SLANT BOX Swap again, sign ups till the end of the month.

Happy Reading,

Mrs. Shamhart