What We Have Been Up to in Reading

The last two weeks have been crazy as we have been trying to get back into a routine.  Each day we have seen progress, and things have become calmer and more productive.

For our read aloud novel, last week we began reading The One and Only Ivan.

We have been talking a lot about theme and point of view.  I felt this was a great novel to apply both of those concepts.  The book is written in first-person from the point of view of a gorilla.  The chapters are short, which really allows you a lot of freedom to decide where to pause and how much to read each day.  I always like to stop at the end of a chapter, so I try to choose read aloud novels with shorter chapters (or at least no more than 10-15 pages per chapter).  This book has a lot of great imagery, figurative language, and sentences with idiomatic or metaphoric meanings.  We have had some good discussions on what the Ivan means when he says certain phrases.

For our independent reading, we also decided to start using www.kidblog.org for our reading responses.  We began using last week, and the kids are loving blogging and being able to comment on each other's posts.  For right now, they are just writing one paragraph.  I want to build up to writing longer reading response weekly entries and use Kidblog as the format to share these,  Because of the commenting feature, it would also be a fun way to publish essays and stories.  We could share without having to stand at the front of the room and read them.

We also have been talking some about idioms this week.  We completed this activity by ReadWriteThink to practice idioms.  It is an interactive way to practice idioms.  I did not have them turn it in.  We just practice it for fun.