This week we read the story 'Help! We Need a Title!' by Herve Tullet...but not the whole thing. If you've ever read the book, you know that it's about a few characters who are trying to organize themselves to tell a story, so we thought we'd help them out! We stopped reading at the part where they called for an author and made ourselves the authors!
First we worked in groups of 3 to make story plans using a big piece of paper and pencils:
Then it was time to animate and record our stories! We used the iPad app 'Puppet Pals' to tell our stories with the five main characters from the book.
When we shared our stories, we noticed that they were all very different, even though they had the same characters! This gave us a chance to think about PERSPECTIVE - one of our key concepts for this unit.
The idea of thinking about the same thing in different ways is new to us, so we will continue to explore this concept as we continue our unit of inquiry.
This morning during our free play we discovered felt materials to retell the story The Three Billy Goats Gruff which we read yesterday. At first it was just Lea and Violett working to retell the story, but soon there were more and more friends interested! Here we are working together and negotiating how to retell the story:
For the last few weeks we've been exploring a new central idea:
People share stories in many ways.
We started off by collecting our ideas about what a story is. As we shared our thinking, it became clear that we made strong connections between stories and books, often understanding them as the same thing. Ms. Alison also noticed that we didn't seem to conceptualize stories as something that we ourselves could create or tell.
So Ms. Alison thought about a time she always sees us telling stories...during our play! We were storytellers, we just didn't realize it yet!
We looked at some photos and videos of our play and thought about whether our play was telling a story or if it at least gave us an idea for a story. At first we weren't quite sure. Some of us thought there were stories there and some of us said, "No way!" So we read a couple of books about children who told beautiful stories through their play:
When we viewed our photos and videos again, we thought a little bit differently. This time we used some more imagination, like Max in Where the Wild Things Are. We chose a few favourite photos a started to think up stories, which we documented as story timelines:
We were so excited by creating all these wonderful ideas that we decided it was time to try our own. Using our own writing, drawings, and the iPad app 'Draw and Tell', we created more stories about our play. Here are a couple of examples:
Lea's story about a little girl making and selling fruit smoothies.
For the last two weeks our Star Name has been Olivia. Her name gave us an opportunity to review and reflect on some of the letters we have already investigated. Many of us were also able to make connections between letters in Olivia's name and letters in our own names.
Since returning from the March holiday, the children have demonstrated a new interest in reading the words in books. It seems that the work we have done throughout the year on developing concepts of print, establishing alphabet knowledge (sound-letter relationships) and using images to support our understandings are solidifying themselves as a solid foundation to support a next big step in emergent reading: decoding words. How exciting!
This week we focused on the 'Gingerbread Man' poem as a shared reading text. We hunted for the letters 'm' and 'r' (as well as 'b' as the children expressed some confusion between 'b' and 'd'), recognized rhymes, and practiced choral reading. The big book of an expanded version of the story was also available for independent reading in the classroom library.During their free play, Zoe, Violett, Lucy, and Ayesha selected the big book and tried to read it as a group, initially using the illustrations and their previous knowledge of the story to support 'pretend' and 'memorized reading'. Soon though, someone had the idea to unclip the poem from the board that we had been working on as a class. The girls put the poem on top of the book and started to match words from the poem with words in the book! Since they had the poem nearly memorized from repeated readings they were able to read many words from the book!
This is the kind of independent action in reading that I am noticing a lot in class and might also be observed at home. Keep supporting your child's emergent reading skills at home with sound and letter play, as well as lots of shared stories, pointing to the words as you read them. What an exciting stage in our development!
Frankie is our latest Star Name. With his name we got to practice two letters that were new to us as a class: f and k. We also learned to write one of the most challenging letters in the D'Nealian alphabet...the lower-case k!
One of the things we noticed right away about Frankie's name was that he has one of the same sounds as our last Star Name Cameron. Frankie has 'k' in the middle of his name which makes the same sound as 'c' at the start of Cameron. This helped us to think again about how letters can sometimes sound the same as each other and how one letter can even make two different sounds depending on the word it is in.
As part of book week our class worked on writing a story in collaboration with K1KB. We used the app 'My Story' on the iPads to draw pictures and record our voices to tell a wonderfully imaginative story. Through this experience we learned that interesting stories have action (or things that happen and change) and that the illustrations need to match the words (either text or voice) so that the book makes sense.
We hope you like our story! Click on the image below to read it. You can also download the book as an Epub file if you use iBooks at home.
For the last two weeks Cameron has been our Star Name. As we sorted out the letters and arranged them to make his name and discover the Star Name we realized how long Cameron's name is. Some of us were reminded of the Kevin Henkes' story Crysanthemum where the main character also has a very long name!
We learned and reviewed how to form the letters and Cameron and explored what sounds the letters make. Because Cameron's name is a long one, these two weeks also gave us an opportunity to think about syllables, or 'chunks of words' as we sometimes call them. We clapped the number of syllables in all of our names and sorted words from The Very Hungry Caterpillar into number of syllable groups.
At our literacy stations we also practiced matching upper-case and lower-case letters and writing letters using the iPad app 'Draw and Tell'.
What a fun week! We had such a good time celebrating Book Week in K1 and with the whole Elementary School. We were so busy with a lot of different activities including readings from our mummies and daddies, a visit to the Book Fair, buddy reading, an author visit, character dress-up day, Dropping Everything and Reading (DEAR), writing in our journals about our favourite places to read, and writing a collaborative story on the iPads with K1KB. Take a lot at the photos to see our Book Week adventures!
Here we are listening to different mummies and a daddy reading stories in their mother tongue languages. This week we heard Dutch, Mandarin, Bahasa Indonesian, English, Arabic, and a very serious Scottish accent! What a great way to learn about the cultures and languages of our friends in the class and a wonderful opportunity to use the illustrations in stories to support our understandings. One of the highlights for us in the mother tongue reading sessions was learning that in Arabic book and text is read from the other way around as compared to English -- right to left! How interesting!
Here are our journal entries about our favourite places to read. Do you notice how we've drawn pictures and taken risks in writing?
Here's the result of our beautiful door transformation! We decided as a class to choose the story 'Chicka Chicka Boom Boom' by Bill Martin Jr. We worked together to brainstorm ideas and complete the project.
We also spent about 10 minutes each day Dropping Everything and Reading! We loved when Mrs. Burden came in with her megaphone to announce the session!
On Thursday, an author called Sarah Mounsey came to visit! She read us two of her stories: Purple Paw Prints and Paw Prints on the Magic Sofa. She also told us about how she gets ideas for her stories and how she records them before making them into books.
Today we dressed up like our favourite book characters and had a reading picnic with our buddies. What fun! Thanks to Mrs. Burden and Mrs. Grant for organizing such a fun week!
For the last two weeks, Lucy has been our Star Name. When we first looked at her name, we noticed that it starts with the letter 'L', a sound and letter that Lea, Denzil, Daniel, Wilma, Axel, Violett and Olivia have too! We practiced writing the letters of her name with sand and in our word study journals. We also talked about how the letters 'u', 'c', and 'y' can make different sounds in different words.
We are a group of Kindergarten 1 students at an international school in Singapore. Our teacher is Ms. Alison. Follow us on our blog and Twitter to see how much we're learning and growing!