We wrote a letter to our principal, trying to persuade him to allow us to have pets in our class. Suddenly, and out of the blue, we had a delivery of some other special pets that needed a new home. We were introduced to our very own pets that we would learn we would be adopting!

Amazingly, there just happened to be 23 pets needing adopting and each had a tag on it with a message and the pet’s name.

Every student selected their new reading buddy. Adoption certificates to go home next week 🙂 Students may choose to take them home, bring to school, but the only requirement is to read to them–20 minutes a day which will make our pets happy.

Happy Reading!

We have launched into our nonfiction reading unit where we are learning the difference between fiction and nonfiction text. We brainstormed what we know about nonfiction and how it differs from the chapter books we often read in class.

We know a lot about nonfiction already! Here is what we brainstormed:

We are learning to ‘stop and jot‘ some of our thinking as we read. Afterwards, we often share it within a small group so others benefit from our reading, too! When sharing some neat things about what we read, we are learning to show the book ‘like a teacher’ and ensure our teammates can see the page we are talking about.

What is something you’re interested in learning more about?

On Thursday, students had fun with our Book Swap game, taking turns carefully selecting a book from the pile and hoping no one else “steals” their book. You may have played a game like this before. In our class, we are only allowed to steal twice and then you MUST pick from the pile.

We began by picking a number out of a hat and if you were lucky enough to pick the highest number, you got to pick last! This meant you got to pick any book you wanted out of all of them. Yahoo!

All in all, it was a fun time filled with excitement and lots of energy. We all opened our books once the game had ended and made a good mess of all the wrapping paper. Ha!

Books don’t just go with you, they take you where you’ve never been.
– Anonymous

Do you have any books on your Christmas wish list this year?

What will you be reading over the Christmas break?

Something special happens when you can connect with another classroom about the same book. As you know, we are reading Stella Diaz Has Something to Say, the Global Read Aloud selection this year.

We are enjoying our book and love to Skype with our friends in California! There is a 3 hour time difference  between us so when it’s 1pm for us, it’s 10am for them!

We love learning about their school, their weather, what life is like in California, and so on. We have so many questions for them such as how many recesses do you get? How many teachers do you have? Do you have a class pet?

We discuss our favourite parts of the book, making personal connections to parts of the book, sharing our understandings of the book, and more.

We can’t wait until next week when we connect with our friends again.

Today we officially began the Global Read Aloud for this year called Stella Diaz Has Something to Say by Angela Dominguez.

We are SO excited to be involved with this chapter book. We made plenty of predictions about what this book could be about with the following photos in our slideshow:

We brainstormed new words (some were Spanish!), characters, setting details, questions we have, and so on and jotted them in our Reader’s Notebook.

What’s so neat about Global Read Aloud is that we are reading the SAME book as so many other students around the world! We will be connecting with a class…somewhere in the world. The exact location will be revealed in the coming days! Geographical clues will be given in class and we’ll have to guess where our partner class is located. Stay tuned.