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!