Part Time Work

For Halloween dress up day, our principal dressed up as the Cat In The Hat and the assistant principal and administrative assistant were Thing 1 and Thing 2. A poem was read on the announcements telling them to look for The Cat In The Hat but didn't say who it was.

After gym, my class was lining up and the big topic of discussion was who is The Cat In The Hat. Someone said, "It's probably the principal." Another child (who knows everything about everything!) said, "No. It can't be her. I heard she got a part-time job so she probably isn't even here." There were shoulder shrugs from some and nods of approval for others who know that this student does always know.  LOL

Lark or Owl?

Gretchen Rubin has many labels for people. One category is larks and owls. 

Larks are early risers. They get up early and get their best work done in the morning. Owls are most productive at night.

I'm definitely a lark. I've been reading a book called the The 5 Am Club. Getting up extra early intrigues me, but until today, 5 am seemed a little extreme. I am someone who really needs 8 hours of sleep a night so to get up at 5 am I'd have to go to bed at 9 pm, which isn't always conducive to participating in activities with the rest of the world. 10 pm seems more reasonable to go to bed, but that means 6 am is the best wake up time. I will have to finish reading the book to find out if I'm convinced, but today a friend posted this. It is persuasive, if you ask me! 

Familiarity....It's Working!

They say that if you read to kids, they start to recognize authors and trends in stories. It's working! Today we read one of our Open Court stories, The Cat Who Became a Poet. We were flipping through the story to get some ideas of what is about and one of the kids said, "That witch looks like the pictures in Roald Dahl books." Quickly, someone grabbed one from their book box and said, "Hey! Quentin Blake's name is on this Roald Dahl book and it's on this story!"

Later, we read a story called Elinor by Barbara Cooney. They recognized the name right away because she also wrote Miss Rumphius, a book we read before the break. They had remembered that Barbara Cooney liked to write stories about family and so they had some guesses about what Elinor might be about. Sure enough, they were right!            Be still my heart!! I love it when a plan comes together!

Genre

Every since we started learning to do BAS assessments, I have been trying to teach genre to my students. It hasn't been an easy thing for me to learn to teach well and it hasn't been easy for my students to learn, but we are getting better. The best thing has been to read a book every day and to talk about the genre of that particular story.

This week we read a book called It Began With a Page. It was a true story of a lady name Gyo Fujikawa. She was Japanese and was an illustrator. I have taught my students that the books with numbers on the spine are non-fiction books and the ones with the first three letters of the author's name are fiction. This book, however, was in the fiction section, even though we figured it was a biography. My students also pointed out that we recently read another book that was a true story, but it was in the fiction section as well. I was stumped. After school, I went to the library and asked the librarian. She was stumped too. We have sent an email to the author to ask her if she knows shy it was shelved on the non-fiction shelves.

Update: She responded very quickly!

From: k y o m a c l e a r [...]
Sent: Saturday, January 11, 2020 11:25 AM
To: Dawn Ackroyd
Subject: Re: Query: It Began With a Page

Hi Dawn,

Just sitting at my desk when your email arrived.

The short answer to your question regarding genre is that the book was mis-categorized and mis-shelved.

I'm delighted you read It Began With a Page with your students.

It is definitely a work of creative nonfiction--which is to say it is based entirely in fact but the language in which the story is told borrows from creative fiction/prose writing.

I hope this helps and doesn't muddy the waters any further (!)

All best wishes to you and your students. Thanks for reaching out!

Kyo