Service Learning: Preschool Buddies

Service Learning.  This is truly my favorite part of every year.

Teaching my children how to communicate, collaborate, create, critically think, and problem solve.  Not only with each other, but out in the world in different settings with different people.  Real world situations.  And the opportunity to be teachers themselves and for them to see themselves that way.  What joy!  

Here are my plans for the year on our service work.  I break it down into kid language and we will work on these plans each time we serve our preschoolers.  

Enduring Understandings:

• Parts impact the whole
• Interaction impacts community
• Roles impact order and responsibility

4C:  Communicating in Diverse Environments:  Understands that different learners can have different ideas

21st Century Skills: Civic Responsibility

• Demonstrates awareness of personal role in the school community by following rules and expectations

Learning Targets:

I can communicate and collaborate with a teammate.

I can understand what it means to serve

I can solve problems that arise by critically thinking

I can understand that I can make a difference my community/ world

Here is what we did on this first visit:

• Read the 5 Little Pumpkins Poem and worked on some simple math problems.
• We taught them one of our morning greetings: Hello Neighbor. We made eye contact and we were gentle in our first meeting.
• We read to our buddies. (this one always makes me tear up...to see them ALL feel so successful as readers!)
• Created: Each group was given a bag full of items that they then used to create something. This was so cool!

Click on this link to enjoy some precious photos.

https://goo.gl/photos/KMA6h3o67D89NiJL7

Making Connections: Text to World

I'm always looking for books that I think my students would enjoy.
Recently I found this non- fiction book depicting how a whale rescue is conducted.  

We loved the beautiful illustrations and we were amazed at the bravery of the rescue divers as they attempt to free the whale from a fisherman's net.

At the same time I heard about a whale rescue attempt off the coast of California.  I found a video clip of a news channel covering the event which I showed the crew.  
http://kfor.com/2015/09/05/by-air-and-sea-crews-search-for-blue-whale-trapped-in-net-off-california/

We experienced a text-world connection!  This led me to share one of my favorite books, BIG AL.

BIG AL was also caught in a fishing net but was rescued in a different way.  Now we made a text-text connection, comparing and contrasting the two books.

Good readers make connections when they read.
Connections can be:  
Text-text: connections between two books
Text-self: connections between something we've experienced and experiences in a book
Text-world:  connections between a book and the world

Look for ways to make connections during your nightly reading!

What are we Reading?

Every year my students LOVE hearing me read these two stories. 
They love that the main characters are animals.  They love that the animals are on adventures that include finding clues and solving problems.  They love the fabulous illustrations and the humor within each chapter.  

I have many reasons for choosing these great books.
Here are some of my thoughts...

1.  Great books motivate children to read.  And these books never fail to do just that.  Now that I've finished reading the first one, some of them are reading it aloud to each other during choice time.  And with fluency and character voices! Priceless!
2.  Great books keep children captivated and asking for more.  They can sit for a long time listening to these stories, but each day I shut the book just when the action gets good.  And we all yell "cliffhanger!" I love that they are getting the beauty of reading!

  I also have learning targets for the children that these books help me meet.
1. I can understand the importance of getting to know the characters in the books I'm reading and how this helps me predict what might happen next in a story.
2.  I can describe what a character trait is and I can share my character traits with other people.
3. I can write a family book including the character traits of my family members.
4.  I can notice who is talking in a story and I can sound like the character when I'm reading.

Ask your child about these 4 characters!  They should be able to describe these characters to you and share how they each help find the keys  to the Treasure Tree!

The Garden System: Time to Harvest

                              

Harvest time was so exciting for both first and second graders! Both grades were able to harvest the tomatoes, peppers, and onions that we started from seed last spring.

We have a good understanding now of how the garden is a system through books, observing our school garden and making notes in our scientific notebooks, and our visit to Mr. Leo's garden.  We continue to add pictures to the garden timeline in our room that helps us keep a visual of the progression of the plants and the system.

Thanks to Ms. Zina who prepared salsa for us to enjoy that was made from our harvested vegetables! It was delicious!

Camp Elim Fun!

Dear Crew,
What an enjoyable experience we had in the mountains together!  I loved having the opportunity to play with my children and to enjoy the beauty and fun at Camp Elim with them.  A HUGE thank you to the parents who chaperoned.  They were kind, helpful, and caring to me and to the children!

Reading Tool: Schema

 Using our schema to help us read and learn.
It's the file cabinet in our brains!

Schema is all of our background knowledge about the world.

Six and seven year olds don't have as much as we adults do, but they do have big files about their families, animals, and other things they have experienced so far in life.

When we bring our schema to the books we read, we "debug the book" by already having vocabulary and knowledge that will be talked about on every page. This makes the reading easier.  If we don't have schema about a book we want to read, then we have to slow down as readers in order to build schema and gather information to make a new folder in our brains.  Cool, huh?

First graders get this grown-up subject when I help them visualize it with the file cabinet in our room and my basic picture of our heads. 

At home, your child's schema can be activated by talking with your child about the books they read before, during, and after the reading.  So open those file cabinets and help your child create some new folders! Go to the library and enjoy talking about books with your child.

Reading Tool: Book Walk

The first day that I begin teaching reading tools, I wear my tool belt and talk about how using just one tool for a job doesn't always work.  The same thing is true when we read.  We need many tools in our tool belt in order to solve tricky words.  (this is not a video, just a screenshot) 


I want to begin sharing the reading tools that I'm teaching the children so you can support your reader at home. Here is the first one.

1.  Book Walking a Fiction Book:  Reading the title, checking out the back cover and title page, and looking through the pictures and talking about the story BEFORE reading any of the words.

This tool is powerful.  The story will be much easier to read when the reader already has some good ideas and predictions about the story and the characters.  Thinking about what the problem might be and how it will be solved will support the reader when they get to tricky words in the text.

Eventually the pictures go away as we begin reading chapter books.  Then we need to know how to make mental images for ourselves, and I'll be teaching everyone how to do this while they are reading.  We are all growing!