Anchor Charts and Anchoring our Learning

Let’s talk about anchor charts for a minute! I feel like I use them CONSTANTLY! I'm always prepping an anchor chart and thinking of how I can make it look pretty (at least to me, I'm no Picasso). I use anchor charts from day one and continue throughout the year. 

I thought I would take a few pictures from my first 2 weeks of school to let you know what exactly it is I do with anchor charts to start out the year :) 

You're Finally HERE!!! This is the cutest book I have ever read! I loved it for the first day of school because I could totally use theatrics and the kiddos were BUYING IT! 

This is a wonderful book about a bunny who has been waiting for You, yes You, forever! He is so excited you're here, but then remembers he had to wait so long and gets mad...but then is happy again...but then gets mad again. I think you get the point. This is a Canadian text, so I couldn't find it local (maybe you'll be luckier)...but we did watch it on youtube. 

Then we wrote on post-it notes what took them so long to get here (to my room for this year). I told them I had been there for weeks getting things ready and preparing for them and I had gotten so tired of waiting. 

It did help that we have a classroom bunny, who is white, and that added to the excitement of this bunny being excited to see them! 

Here is our classroom bunny! This is Mr. Fredrickson :) 

 Text Features

Fiction versus Non Fiction  

Good Fit books    

Then we started talking about reading and writing workshop and expectations. This was a LOT of talking about what we do during reading workshop, what we do during writing workshop, how we choose books, how we take care of books, etc. These posters were a lot of brainstorming and talking between the kiddos and I. Then we topped it off with everyone's favorite, Chrysanthemum. This brought us to the conversation about 'how we talk to people', 'how we treat people', and 'how we can all be unique.'     

  On to summarizing! This was big for the kiddos in order to help them understand how to summarize and how to write their summaries. We went with the 'somebody, wanted, but, so, then' We talked about each part and how we explain it in our words. Thennnnn we read Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. Doesn't everyone love that book?! We then created a post-it not for each part of our summary. We then read an AMAZING book called Going Places.

This book is about being unique, being brave, and being awesome! We read it and the kiddos went crazy! Then, we did a summary again on a different colored post-it note. They had it at that point!     

onnnnn to math!        

we started place value

addition and subtraction strategies

and rounding

Lastly, we worked on stamina...most of my kiddos acted like they had never heard this work :/ so we talked and we practiced and I was a little strict with our first go and we made it to four and a half minutes. It can only go up from here!