Chester's Way... A little bit of Kevin Henkes AND a report card request.

So who doesn't love books by Kevin Henkes?!?  I know I do!  I can't get enough of those little mice.  For the next 2 weeks we are doing an author's study over Kevin Henkes.  This week we started off with Chester's Way and Julius, The baby of the World.  We have been working on describing characters and the reason for their actions.  It can be difficult at times to get a first grader to dive deep into critical thinking about what is taking place in the book and why the characters do what they do.  We started off by reading Chester's Way and really taking a close look at the 3 main characters.  I wanted the kiddos to describe the characters and tell about their actions and make text to self connections.  They did pretty good with this to start off with and got much better by the end of the week.  I started off with anchor charts.  I gave each student a post it note.  I wanted them to write either a description of the character or one of their actions.  

After diving deep into each of the main characters they did a journal entry in their reading journals.  They had to write a discription of each character using the sentence starter... Chester is ___.  Lily is ______.  Wilson is ______.  The write what happen at the beginning, middle, and end. (Spiraling back to that.)  I try to have them complete a journal entry a week independently over the skill and story we have been working on.  
{forgot to post a pic of this...will do that next post}

Now that they have a good understanding of the characters, we are going to start discussing the plot of the story and how the plot can change depending on the characters actions! More mice activities coming soon!! 

I forgot to post last week, but we had to make these super cute MLK's and new year resolutions. I got this fabulous idea from The First Grade Parade!  Just LOVE her blog!! ADORABLE!

SOOOOO my team and I are wanting SOOOO badly to get away from numerical averages for first grade.  This is our chance and we were asked to propose a report idea that we would like to use.  After sitting together for quite some time we still had nothing on paper.  If you use a report card/grading system that is scale based (1-4) or something like mastery, proficient, needs improvement etc. could you PLEASE let me take a peek to get some ideas.  We are stuck and need some guidance of what other teachers and districts use.  If possible could you email to me? jaymeelaymance@gmail.com...  Or leave a comment on where I can go to find it? 

Next week will be more post about Chester's Way with some plot activities and printables!
Happy Friday!! YAAAHOOOO!!