Hey there!!! Well, we had a little snow…but no snow day and now spring has officially made her presence {no complaining about that!} So, I think I can now quit bothering you and accept that there will be NO snow days this year! This past week the kiddos had a BLAST learning all about tigers. One of the reasons I love close reads…is simply seeing the kids light up when they share their new information. At the beginning of the week when we make our bubble chart they are always quite certain they are tiger experts before hearing the text, but somehow always seem to learn more information after the text 😉
This week when we answered our text-dependent questions I was sure to compliment the students that were able to provide exact statements from the text! They beamed ear to ear…experts after all!
You can see above our selection of books for the week! A Tiger Grows Up can be harder to get a hold of, but it is a great book for the steps of the tiger growing and changing. I also feel that it is important for the students to know that nonfiction doesn’t always have to offer photographs.
You can download these plans by clicking below!
Here is our week’s bubble chart on tigers! Not sure why I haven’t thought about it before, but this upcoming week I will use an alternate marker to show our learning before and then after listening to the text!
And our vocabulary for for week….. I’d have to say that ‘territory’ was by far the word they picked up the best this week. I thought it would help for their understanding if we had a demonstration using our carpet as the “territory.” Well, I got my point across and then had 20 ROARING tigers on my carpet….it took a few more clap, clap, claps to get their attention! Yeah, good one! 😉
Our essential questions….comparing our tiger book to Leo the Late Bloomer.
For our content study we built a can/have/are chart for Tigers! Sorry that ‘tigers’ is off centered…it really bothered me too, but I then I got over it. LOL!
This week in writing we worked on, How I’ve Grown and Changed booklets! Just like the tigers…we have also grown and changed over the years. We wrote one page in our booklets for us a babies, toddlers, and then big school kids! You can download these booklets as a freebie HERE.
Last but not least….what would tiger’s week be without a tigers easy reader?? We have been working on our fluency, so I had this recorded for that!
You can view this nonfiction easy readers in the packet below….
You can download my plans for next week below…
Have a great week! I’ll be back soon with an addition post and some more organizing!
I love how organized and cohesive your plans are! If I could ask – what is the difference between your readers workshop time and your Daily 5/reading groups time? I have an hour for my workshop time and am trying to figure out how to best incorporate your close reading packets with my first graders 🙂
Paige
Hi there Paige! My reader's workshop time is whole-group. We all come to the carpet and I read the text to the students. We discuss vocabulary and answer text-dependent questions with our turn-partners. My Daily Five/reading group time is when I pull small groups back to my table. The other students that aren't at my table are doing work on writing, word word, or listening to reading!
I hope that helps 🙂
Tara
Oh.My.gosh. I am in love with the writing your Kinders are producing. What a treat! I had my husband read a couple and he gave up and said "I can't read that." I proudly said, "A lot of ppl wouldn't. But us Kindergarten teachers do. And that writing is amazing!" Keep up the great work!!