Congratulations to April and Linlin who were able to read all the books for the the March Reading Challenge AND show me their completed sheets.
Tag: Kindergarten
The eve of our return to a new way of being together
Greetings Quilchena families,
I hope that you are all healthy and that you are finding ways to be calm and joyful these days. This is a very strange time we are living through right now and there are so many different ways to react; we may experience many of those different reactions all in one day!
As we navigate the next few days and weeks, you will hear from classroom teachers and from Mrs Sleep. You can also stay tuned here for links to activities, conversation starters, and other helpful connections to our learning community.
You will hear from your classroom teacher by the end of this week. In the mean time, start getting up at a regular time each day and follow a basic schedule (that includes getting dressed and eating regular meals 😉) and KEEP READING.
I’m looking forward to the interesting things we will discover as our attention is focused in different ways over the next few months. Please reach out if you are struggling: hearts are open.
take care, and stay tuned.
Tips for Reading Aloud: March edition
There is something extra special about sharing a beloved book from our childhood with our own small people. There are a number of picture books from when I was little (early 80s) that are still in print today.
It is always a good idea to preview a book before beginning to read it aloud. In the case of a book we remember fondly from childhood, the preview isn’t so much about making sure the text works well as a read-aloud, but rather to screen it against the test of time. The fact is that some books, despite our fondest memories, do not age well. When read today, to today’s young audience, a number of “classics” are rather jarring in their treatment of diverse characters (read: they are sexist and racist.)
Sometimes we can change words on the fly, if we encounter a problematic term and it’s fairly isolated. Other times the prejudice becomes so thick, so quickly, that the best thing we can do is to stop reading and show our authentic dislike of the text; talk about why the prejudice is not okay as well as how you remember reading the book as a child (when it wasn’t something that stuck out as inappropriate) and isn’t it great that we can see a tangible example of how we are getting better as a society?
Keep sharing your favourite stories with the young people in your life.
Happy reading!
Tips for reading aloud: December edition
I read The Longest Night by Marion Bauer to many of my classes this week in preparation for the winter solstice on Saturday. Each time, I turned off the lights over the story-time area of the library to simulate the dark and quiet of the longest night of the year.
The resulting atmosphere was very effective to invoke the rich wintery shadows of the illustrations as well as to highlight the sense of the animals calling out into the night.
Sometimes setting up the environment with a simple change can be an easy way to enrich our read aloud by infusing our listener’s atmospheric experience.