Tag Archives: connections

Reading!

In Readers’ Workshop this week, the students continued to practice making connections to stories we read. While reading Little Critter books, we jotted down their different connections.  Later, we looked over the connections to see if they helped us to understand the book better.   We talked about how we make lots of little connections as we are reading, but the connections that help us understand a book even better are often connections that are connected to the main idea/the story of the lesson a story is trying to teach you or the ones that help us understand what a character is feeling in a story.  If we’ve had a similar experience, we know just how the character feels. Sometimes these connections can even help us predict what might come next in a story.

The students have really enjoyed sharing their connections with the rest of the class, but there was not enough time for us all to share and in order for us not to forget or lose those important connections, we taught the kids about how readers often write their connections down to keep track of their thinking.  The kids were introduced to the following template to guide them in writing their connections:

Title reminds me of ______________. I felt _________.

Reading Update!

A big event in our reading workshop this week was the introduction of “Read to Someone.”  The kids are SO excited about the opportunity to read to a friend.  We discussed WHY it would help us to read to someone.  The kids came up with ideas like:  It will help us to be a better reader, We can learn about new books, Our reading will sound smoother (more fluent), and it’s FUN!  We learned that there is a special way to sit if we choose to read to someone– EEKK!  This means, elbow-elbow, knee-knee, book between you and me.  This allows the partners to be sitting close with the book right between the two.  We remembered that we need to use a whisper voice so only our partner can hear us.  We will start trying that out this week!  🙂

We also continued to work on making text to self connections. We focused on how the best connections remind us of something that has happened to us, include a feeling and are connected to the heart of the story.  We talked about how we make lots of little connections as we are reading, but the connections that help us understand a book even better are often connections that are connected to the main idea of the story of the lesson a story is trying to teach you. This week, we talked to the kids about how they often make connections to books that I read aloud to them, but they also make connections to the books that they read on their own.  We will continue to share the connections each student has made  as they read.

Miss Taber 🙂

Reading Update

In Readers’ Workshop this week, the students continued to practice making connections to stories we read. While reading the books I Was So Mad and Koala Lou we jotted down their different connections.  We picked a specific part in the story that reminded us of something in our own lives and shared how it made us feel.  If we’ve had a similar experience, we know just how the character feels. Sometimes these connections can even help us predict what might come next in a story.  The students have really enjoyed sharing their connections with the rest of the class.  We will continue this week looking more into connecting to the heart of the specific page or the story to help us understand.

In our spelling words, we have noticed a pattern that sometimes S says /s/ and other times S says /z/.  We discussed how there are consonants that make more than one sound (just like our vowels).

Miss Taber 🙂

Writing Update

We began the week reviewing the R Sisters (ar, er, ir, or, ur) and the kids got a new tool to help them when they are reading and have a tricky word that has one of the R Sisters.  This R Sister tool will now be in their WEB bags that come home each night.  If you notice that your student is getting stuck on a word in their WEB book, encourage them to use their tools!

This week, we talked about how good readers read and think at the same time.  Sometimes when we are reading, we notice something from the story that reminds us of an event in our life.  We call this thinking, making text-to-self connections.  Good readers use these connections to better understand a story.  We practiced making connections to Little Critter books (Just Going To The Dentist & Just Lost).

Miss Taber 🙂