"News of the Day" is an interactive writing time where I don't share the pen a whole lot, but my students are helping spell and "grammarize" the entire time.
The "News of the Day" goes something like this:
We gather on the rug, the kid of the day stands by the easel, and I begin...
Me: Today is
students: Capital T-o-d-a-y i-s
Me: Monday, - if you don't know how to spell that word, check the calendar behind you. Give me a thumbs up when you are ready to help spell.
students: Capital M-o-n-d-a-y comma
Me: October 10capital O-c-t-0-b-e-r 10 comma 2011 period
As they spell, I am writing this down. If they chorally spell a word wrong or forget a capital or punctuation, I continue anyway.
Then the leader spells and writes their name on the chart paper...
Me: said
students: s-a-i-d comma quotes
The kid says their news and we follow a similar format for writing their news. This is where I am able to model, teach, and have us practice strategies for spelling unknown words. We do a lot of counting sounds and thinking about resources we have around our classroom that could help us.
At the end of their news, we make sure everything is correct and the leader reads it to us. Then we read it aloud together. The leader takes it back to their seat to draw an illustration.
At the end of the month, I staple them into a big book, hang them on a hanger, and it becomes a favorite reading activity for my students.
As the year goes on, we study all sorts of things through our news... we make contractions, search for "hunks and chunks", swap out common words for better synonyms... we even find words that talk about common misspellings. I always have kids who spell saw "SALL" because they tend to say it that way. Last week, someone's news said they saw four deer before school that morning so we had a great chat about how to correctly say the word so we could correctly spell the word.
I love doing "News of the Day". I think it's a fun way for us to write and learn together... and we love re-reading old news too! :) Here's a picture of some of my sweeties reading the news together this afternoon.
What a great way to work in all those grammar rules! I love that you put each month's news in a book; I know your kids must absolutely love that!
ReplyDeleteI really like this idea, and I like that they can go back to it and rereading it. That makes it a just rich text for those struggling friends!
ReplyDeleteLove your ideas! About how long do you spend of this activity each day and how do you choose the student that tells the news?
ReplyDeleteVery cute idea...gotta try it!!!
ReplyDeleteI just recently doing something similar. We do the news of the day together on the Smartboard. I then print it without corrections and the kids fix it. It's working well so far. I like that you have them use resources in ther room to spell...I'll have to do that. :)
ReplyDeleteI do something VERY similar w/ my K students!! We are working on writing together. They help me create, count & spell the sentence. I take the page on the overhead screen (yep...overhead :( ) and then make a copy so each kiddo can take a copy home to ready w/ families. AND then I have a classroom binder that they go into for future reading by students!!
ReplyDeleteI almost have all families comment on it by conferences -- their kiddos LOVE IT!
LOVE making it on bigger paper & saving as a lg book! HOW FUN!
Thanks for sharing!!
Sarah Hetrick
shetrick@gmail.com
This is a great way to sneak in a mini-lesson. I have a weird 30 minute chunk at the end of my day - too much time to pack up, but too little to work on anything lengthy. I can see this fitting in nicely. Thanks for the great idea!
ReplyDeleteChristine
http://hoppingintofirstgrade.blogspot.com/