Author Visit

Welcome back, it was interesting to hear about each of the children's Thanksgiving weekends.  I got to hear about potato volcanoes, Mom's who "can't cook a turkey", tasty pumpkin pie, eating ham, and getting together with cousins.

This morning we officially began our guided reading groups (now that every child has been assessed).  I was able to read with 2 groups and will read with the other 3 groups over the next 2 days.  Once guided reading was over we reviewed "warm colors" from last year and painted a sunset scene in our visual journals, soon we will glue Calgary's skyline on top of it.

Now that most children have learned how to read we are working towards reading for information and highlighting key points.  Each child got an information page on Terry Fox, they worked in groups to highlight the key words from each sentence.  Once highlighted we did a whole group writing activity to write about a "Terry Fox Recipe" for success.  This type of writing is called procedural writing and we will be spending more time on in over the next few months.

In the afternoon we had Bill Richards the Author of the Alphabet Thief talk to us.  He is part of a large contingent of authors who are in Calgary for Wordfest.  I think he got a good belly laugh out of each and every one of us.

Tomorrow we will have Mr.Kent Hehr in our class.  He will be talking to our class about contributing to local community and what it is to be an active participant in the local, global and national community.

This weeks spelling words are;

author
writer
his
is
an
and
can
all
call
land
hand
small

Sneaky Question:  Tell me something special about your Thanksgiving weekend.