Bubble Maps and WW

What an exhausting and wonderful week!  Back to School Night really drained me with the wacky schedule, but we made it through another successful 5 days.  This week our focus was on bubble maps and what writers write. 

We worked on bubble maps all week long as a class.  Since we just started with HM, each day we did a bubble map based on the letter of the day (apple, banana, cow).  Thankfully for us, the Mobile Dairy Council came so we had a lot to say about the cow!  We ended the week with our first Big Buddies day, when our big buddies helped us make bubble maps about ourselves.  Those kids were SO adorable!  The big buddies interviewed the little buddies and they worked together using pictures and words to describe my kinders.  Here are the results.

 This is a great example because the big buddy used all adjectives (yay!) and my (kinder who is an ELL with Speech services) suggested "curious."  Love it!

 I love this one because it really shows the big buddy's opinion of his little buddy.  So sweet!

I love the pictures in this one.  We talked about drawing pictures so that the little buddy could "read" it later.

This one is great because my kinder wrote the words first (experimenting with letters) and the big buddy translated it.  Such great teamwork!

Next week is the dubble bubble, which we will of course use to compare big and little buddies.  I can't wait to see the results.

What do writers write?

This week's anchor chart was about genres.  I collected some from around the house and school, and posted them on the chart.  Then we worked together to label them (a previous lesson).  Afterwards, I chose one to model.  I made a menu.  When it was time to write, I put out post-its, blank paper, and paper bags.  The paper bags were the most popular.

The next day I chose the book.  I also took the opportunity to use a mentor text.  We looked at our HM big book, Mice Squeak We Speak.  We first looked at the front cover, noticing the different attributes.  We saw letters.  Some letters were the author's name, so I wrote my name in the same place on my book (a folded piece of construction paper).  We also saw letters that made the title, which I wrote too (bigger and in another color like the anchor text).  The biggest part was an illustration that showed what the book would be about.  My title was "The Day the Cow Came" so I drew a cow.  We also noticed a border which I added to fancy it up.

The following day we opened the book again (we read it much earlier) and took note of what we saw.  Pictures, letters, and little dots.  So I added an illustration for my beginning, words to tell the story, and one of those little dots at the end.  Yep, I introduced periods to kids that can't all write their name.  Our team usually reserves periods, space, and capitals for DECEMBER.  It was a brave (and some may say foolish) thing to do, but I stand behind it.  A third or more of my class added periods in their writing that day. PHENOMENAL!  I was so excited.  For those who were ready, they soaked it up.  For those who weren't, they will hear it a thousand more times before June.  I realize now that work samples would be great to post, so I'll update with some next week.  Yay for WW!