Read Around the Room

READ AND WRITE 180-DAY 87

Thursday, January 5, 2012

HAPPY NEW YEAR! It was back to school today. Some people don’t like starting back with just a couple of days because you can’t really start a new unit or anything. But I think it gives us time to ease back into the flow of things.

We labeled our english sentence today and wrote a paragraph from it. And I had a brilliant idea come to me like a moth goes to a light. Really, I had my OWN idea instead of borrowing someone else’s from the internet. 🙂

These sentences that we have been labeling are just ones that I have been making up, but I thought how cool would it be if I pulled  a sentence out of a book and used this time to do a book talk each day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Aren’t I a genius?? Don’t be bashful-say I am. 🙂

So this is what it looked like today: Today’s sentence is from Among The Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix. I think this book talk thing is going to be a good thing.

We caught up on our Truckerbuddy emails.

 

 

 

We also wrote a New Year’s Goal for ourselves as readers and then devised a plan to reach that goal. Most of the kids said they wanted to read a certain number of books. Hey, whatever it takes to get them reading.

THEN-the BIG activity!!!! We did “Read Around the Room”. I did this once with my 6th graders last year and LOVED it. Since we have voted to STOP the madness the worksheet packets and RETURN to read to self, I told them everybody needs a book in their hand. A good book-one they want to read.

They all sat in a big circle (our circle actually went around a long group of desks-small space). Everyone had a book (that I had picked out). I set the timer. They started on page 1 of their book and read until I said stop which was between 1 1/2 minutes-2 minutes. If it was a book they wanted to read in the future they wrote it in their reading notebook on their TBR list. Then we passed the books to the left. Repeat. We did this until all 26 students had read the beginning of all 26 books. Everyone said they had written at least 3 titles down on their TBR list so I was happy. PLUS-each time they were reading-I read. :):):) Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins-2nd book in The Hunger Games trilogy which I can’t seem to get enough of. 🙂 One time I even told them I wish they would stop making ME have to stop reading to fiddle with the timer. 🙂

Here is what we looked like during “Read Around the Room”:

 

 

 

IT WAS A GREAT DAY!