All Hallow’s READ

"It was almost Halloween, but that pumpkin just sat."

We kicked off our All Hallow's Read week with 6 staff share reading Erica Silverman's book Big Pumpkin. What a great patterned story of a witch who can not pick her over grown pumpkin, yet wants to make pumpkin pie for Halloween. We donned our book character costumes to share a scary, ok not so scary, book for Halloween. 

As a way to build excitement with reading and books,  we are sharing Halloween and pumpkin stories we read with our class with the whole school by adding the name of the book on a pumpkin cut out. The cut outs are added to a growing pumpkin patch in the hall. Out pumpkin patch is half way filled. I can not wait to see it grow this week. 

 My students will continue enjoying Big Pumpkin with retelling the story and making small puppets that the students will share with their families at the end of the week.  I love this time of year. At home I have bats hanging in my chandelier, a giant spider web in the entry, a scary cat and bones spooking up the mantle. I love that this time of year does not have to be all about the sugary treats, but also have the treat of a great spooky story.

The Interactive Bulletin Board

We are the reading room, in which I do not need to plan bulletin board space for math, daily schedule, calendar or science. This leaves me the luxury to use a lot of space for reading strategies and for anchor charts. 

In the past I have created anchor charts with students and displayed them. Yet I questioned how much they were used once they were posted. This year I incorporated the anchor charts as part of the bulletin board. A goal for first and second graders is to retell stories, which includes the characters, the setting and the events of the story. Thus our bulletin board reflects these elements of a story.

Using mentor texts, second graders have investigated characters and the settings of stories. We have now added our thoughts and examples found on our anchor bulletin board. 

On top of the chart are questions we can ask to help tell or write about characters.
On  the side are examples from anchor test. 

As a group we read Toot and Puddle by Holly Hobbie and discovered that asking questions about what characters like, what they want and how characters act, guide us to be able to tell a lot about characters in stories.

We enjoyed Peter Brown's story Mr. Tiger Goes Wild. We found that the setting can change in the same story, Mr. Tiger lives in the city yet leaves for the wild. Students are now including the setting of their books when retelling the story.

One of my favorite aspects of this bulletin board is the stickies, which are easily inter changeable as we continue reading more. We will continue our learning as we work on retelling events of our stories.