This week, we began our first official reading and writing units, and they share a focus: narratives. In reading block, we'll be reading primarily fiction texts, turning our attention to the elements of fiction like characters, setting, plot, and theme. On Monday, we ended up applying the typical plot structure of stories to comic strips, with the kids working in small groups to label their assigned comic with literary words like conflict and resolution. These ranged from Peanuts to Denice the Menace to Calvin and Hobbes. This was definitely a challenging task, but many groups did a really nice job making sense of their strip and implementing what they learned. We also talked about how we can use this typical story pattern to help us summarize. A similar prewriting strategy is called "Somebody In Wanted But So Then". This helps kids pull out the most important information prior to writing a summary, which is an important skill that we'll be doing a lot of this year. In writing, we've discussed what makes a story engaging to read, and used these ideas to help us brainstorm a topic for our first processed writing of the school year, which will be a personal narrative. Aligning our fiction reading unit and personal narrative writing unit allows kids to see strong writing strategies in action.

We also celebrated "We Belong Week" this week. School-wide activities for this community week included banner and t-shirt decorating, buddies, and class discussions on topics like belonging and inclusion. Both homerooms got to read with the first graders on Wednesday, which was fun. And we had a blast decorating t-shirts on Thursday. Ziyad made me laugh with his realization after he finished his design... (picture evidence to the right--I promise he said I could!)

Our Bucket Fillers this week were Samar and Natalie. What sweet, hardworking young ladies they both are. Samar has been working on an extra writing since the beginning of the year that's now several pages in length. She's also really attentive and kind to those around her, and I'm really looking forward to having lunch with her on Monday. Natalie is always helping me put out supplies and clean up the classroom, and she is consistently engaged in classroom lessons and discussions. I'm sure she'll be getting Bucket Filler quite a few times this school year! :)