"It's Monday...What Are You Reading?"

Today, we continued our Gail Gibbons author study after attending an assembly with a wonderful story-teller!  Today, students continued to notice Gail Gibbon's use of different text structures and text features in the book Deserts.  We noticed a variety of text structures, including description, compare/contrast, main idea & details, and cause-and-effect.  The variety of structures help the author share their information in the most appropriate way.  We also noticed many of her commonly used text features once again, including diagrams, vocabulary words, cut-aways, and even in-sets.  Ask your child what these features are and how they help us understand her book about deserts!  Happy reading!

"It's Monday...What Are You Reading?"

It's Monday and we are back to a full day's work!  It was great meeting with everyone over the conference days!  Today we started our author study of Gail Gibbons to wrap up our non-fiction unit of study.  She is a well-known author of non-fiction books who has written over 170 books!  Wow!  We will study how she structures her writing (main idea/details, compare/contrast, cause & effect, sequence of events, description...) and her amazing text features.  She will be a "mentor author" for our non-fiction books that we are writing!  Check her work out and ask your child what his or her favorite Gail Gibbons book is throughout our study!

"It's Monday...What Are You Reading?"

Today we started our mini study of animal homes.  As a class, we are reading and discussing the story, Animals Homes, and discussing the main idea, supporting details, and HOW the details support the main idea.  In Book Clubs, students are reading about how different animals build their homes, including birds, spiders and insects, and mammals.  Animals are truly architects and engineers!  During reading, I shared a video of weaver birds building their nests with my "bird" book club.  Check it out!  It's amazing how well they sew!  At reader's round-up, I shared the video below that shows how prairie dogs build their complex burrow system.  Happy reading!