Monday, February 7, 2011

"Pop! Pop!" Who Knew Making "Popcorn" Was So Much Fun...

"Hey, did you know that harpee eagles prey on sloths or that the sloth is the slowest moving creature on Earth?"
"Wow!! I just learned that an eel's jaw can crush bones! Some even have poisonous flesh!"
"I didn't know that winter lasts six months in the Arctic!"
"I can't believe that EACH of T-Rex's teeth were the size of a steak knife! Can you imagine 1,000 of those chomping down on you?"

Today we had tons of fun reading and learning! We have been learning about nonfiction in reading and now we are beginning the report writing process in writer's workshop. So, today we took some pre-steps to researching- recognizing when we learn something new when we read! We learned so many new things today as we partner read and got to share some really cool "popcorn" we made! No, we didn't really make popcorn, but our brains did. See, when we read AND think our brain kind of wakes up. It might start out slow as it is warming up, but soon as I think and think and think and read and read and read the "popcorn" just takes over! Pop.......... pop.........pop......pop...pop..pop.pop.pop.pop.pop.poppopopopopop!!! All this "popcorn" is really all the new ideas I'm having and connections that I'm making!
Reading to learn is a lot of fun!

To encourage your child to read even more nonfiction (and expose them to massive amount of vocabulary!) try taking them to the library to answer questions that they've always wondered about, get a subscription to a child's nonfiction magazine like Sports Illustrated for Kids or Ranger Rick. Highlights Magazine also has nonfiction and fiction articles. You can also read excerpts of magazines, the newspaper, and the Internet to them on topics that interests you both or to learn more about a topic that might have come up in conversation! Exposure to more and more nonfiction is a powerful tool to learning in so many ways!

Check out some of our strategy work as we used mini sticky-notes with an exclamation mark to show where we learned something new!




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