It just doesn't get any better than hanging out with kids who are excited and eager to learn. Today I had the privilege of spending time with kindergarten thru eighth grades.
I got to enjoy Show-and-Tell with kindergarten. The topic was the letter A, and friends brought items ranging from acorns (two of them), to ponies named Applesauce (two again!), to art, to action figures, to apricot fruit peels for sharing with the class. I'm looking forward to the letter B next week. Maybe someone will bring brownies for the teachers! (not so subtle hint)
Instead of our normal Show-and-Tell in first and second grade, we had Book Club today. As a class, we read and discussed Pecos Bill, The Rough-Face Girl, and Skippyjon Jones in Mummy Trouble. Much to my surprise, the class favorite was The Rough-Face Girl, an Algonquin Indian Cinderella story. The kids could not get close enough to the book! They were on their knees and scooting closer with each word. Next week we will do Book Club again; however, I'd like for each student to bring one book from home that they can confidently read to a classmate. We are working to improve our reading skills, grow our vocabularies, connect the images with the text and expand our imaginations and creativity.
Third through eighth grades began giving their informative speeches today. Let me just say that I am thoroughly impressed with the time and effort students have put into these. Speeches ranged in length from 2 - 9 1/2 minutes! All speeches have provided new, insightful information on a wide variety of topics, and many speakers have used visual aids of some sort. Visual aids were not a requirement, so I'm very pleased to see this sort of planning, creativity and tenacity. I'm so very proud of every single speaker at Mighty Oaks. The kids are doing an outstanding job! All speakers were given written feedback, so look for it in their binders.
Before giving speeches, students were given about 20 minutes to wrap up their speech writing. If your student was unable to finish his/her speech, please encourage them to work on it between now and next Monday. We will spend the entire class period next Monday delivering speeches, so there will not be any more class time to prepare them.
Those who had their speeches completed at the beginning of class spent their 20 minutes across the hall with a wordless picture book - Free Fall by David Wiesner. As a group, students "read" the pictures and made up a story to go with the illustrations. Students really seemed to enjoy this exercise, and I look forward to hearing their stories when we finish with the informational speeches.
