Language Arts
After spring break, we began our non-fiction writer’s process. Each child has written their own autobiography about the current year at Orchard, to be published in our end of school yearbook. The kids went through the writing steps of brainstorming, graphic organizing, illustrating, and writing. We always have so much fun reading yearbooks from years past. We use the yearbooks as a tool to notice how one can structure their writing, and offer examples of topics a student may want to write about. The kids get a kick seeing teachers and students over time, and they enjoy reading about what other kids have enjoyed about that school year at Orchard.
Concurrently with our writing experience, we moved into our exploration of verbs. The yearbook autobiography helped the students to write about what ‘actions’ they ‘do’ at Orchard. We then started a literature study of the familiar Where the Wild Things Are. Many of the children have this story nearly memorized, which makes it a great tool to further support their reading skills by tracking the words as we read. The illustrated textless pages offered a great chance to describe the ‘actions’ we could see. The children drew their own wild things, and wrote about what actions they do. With Clover’s help, we also turned a section of the rug room into forest, that like Where the Wild Things Are, “grows and grows.”
Our salad project also has been a vehicle to study verbs. After the kids created their salad, we went on our field trip to New Leaf. Later, they brainstormed the verbs necessary to make our salad-from ‘wash’ all to ‘crush’ walnuts and even ‘massage’ our kale.
We have been practicing our letters and spelling through word and sentence dictations. This has also given us an opportunity to focus on commonly misspelled words by creating high frequency word flash cards and playing card games with them. Our current song, Bruno Mars’ You Can Count on Me has lots of these High Frequency words for us to study. Also, the kids finished up their introduction of letter sounds and shapes with the letter z!
