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Thursday, April 30, 2015

What's in a Book?

Welcome back! I hope you all had a wonderful, relaxing, memorable time during your April vacation. We were lucky enough to take a family road trip this year to Myrtle Beach. We had a blast! Lots of beach time and plenty of sun. We were hoping to bring some of it back with us :)



Now onto the happenings here at school. We had a really productive week back. Throughout the year first graders continue to learn, model, and apply all kinds of reading strategies. When we read the key is understanding what we are reading. Some ways we can show our understanding include summarizing, analyzing, inferring, and even critiquing. We use these skills orally during and after read alouds, in small groups during guided reading, and independently in our reader's response journals.

Here are a few ways we are demonstrating and applying our reading comprehension skills...

Author's Purpose
This is a big one! Children learn that motivating every story, article, or text they encounter is the author's purpose. Is the author trying to persuade us, are they trying to inform us, or are they trying to entertain us? We use the acronym PIE to give children the vocabulary they need to distinguish why an author is writing a piece. It's also a great connection to the writing we have done. During small moments our purpose was to entertain. During our nonfiction unit our purpose was to inform. Now in our opinion writing unit our purpose is to persuade! It's magical when they start to recognize the reading/writing connection!



Character Traits
We continue to work on character traits throughout the year. Children learn to make connections between characters based on similar traits. We make predictions about how a main character might act based upon their character traits. We look for evidence in the books we hear and read to support our opinions about character.

After reading a book, this group is creating a list of character traits to describe
the main character.


Looking for evidence to support his thinking!


Inference
Children can think about what motivates a character, how a character is feeling, and interpret actions by inferring. We can use the words and illustrations to interpret meaning. By inferring children can also gain a deeper understanding of cause and effect. 

This group is using illustration from a text to gain a better understanding of how the character's
feeling are changing throughout the story.


Thanks for stopping by and taking a sneak peak at how we learn. You can practice all of these strategies at home too! The key is to get your child talking about stories, connecting to characters, and ultimately gaining a deeper understanding of story elements!!