Edward the Emu

     This week's mentor text was Edward the Emu.  We also used the internet to learn more about his friend Edwina.  It all started last Friday when I made our EMU poster and the children saw it.  They were all buzzing, "What's an emu?".  It got us excited for Monday.  On Monday, we talked about how good readers make predictions before and during reading.  We then started the book, BUT I didn't read the ending.  We wrote our predictions in our reading notebook and had to wait until Tuesday to confirm or adjust our endings.  Well, I don't think that anyone got the exact ending but great predictions, using text and picture clues were made.

     We filled in facts on that EMU poster the children saw, later in the week after reading about real emus.  We also identified and fixed sentences from the text that were scattered around the room.  No-one should forget that sentences start with capital letters and end with punctuation now.  We're experts.  For more sentence writing fun, we took boring sentences and STRETCHED them, not tugged, STRETCHED.

     We have also been reading some Cynthia Rylant stories and even took turns reading Mr. Putter and Tabby stories as plays.  The children got excited when they got to be Tabby.  He always had important lines to read.

     Math has been fun with some computation practice, missing addends and word problems.  We used dice to add three numbers with friends.  Word problems can be SUPER tricky.  I try to get students to picture in their mind what's being asked and when they finish, to think about if their answer is reasonable.

     Next week we can look forward to taking the story that we started planning on Friday and creating a draft.  Those are the first two steps in the writing process.