Building a Snowman!

Here is a picture of our current PWIM poster.  We have been working really hard on using our poster throughout the day while we are talking and writing.  The words around the poster are the words that the students came up with and we use daily.  One of the ways we use the words is by sorting them into categories that show similarities.  They like to call it..."See if we can trick Miss Mills."  When I model this for the students I try to use categories such as:  rhyming, same word or letters within the word, or all are visible on the picture to be in the same category.  We are getting better at this and the students seem to really enjoy this activity.

Skyler and Joseph are sorting!

Another thing that we do is use our words that are on the poster and in our envelope to create sentences that can be directly related to the poster, or related through the student by means of experience when dealing with whatever the poster is showing us.  We are really good at creating sentences about the poster and we are trying to work on relating those words to life outside of school. 

Cindy and Evelyn are going through the sentences that we created during group and testing each other to see if they can read the sentence while Pablo is reading his sentences from his PWIM binder that has all of the posters we have done this far in the year.  The students really seem to enjoy going back to see if they can read what they had written in the past! 

This short 19 second video of Faith and Anahi is an example of the students choral reading from their binder.  It is kind of hard to hear at the beginning but they are reading!!!

It is really exciting for me to watch them get so excited about gaining skills through our "work" with the PWIM poster.  I can't wait to see what they will do at the end of the week when we take a few of our sentences and turn it into a story on our smart board!  This will help all of us in writing so we can talk about sentence structure, spelling, capital letters, and punctuation which we have been talking about with our sight words!!

Until next time....