As promised, we are following up last week’s Teacher Book Club: Episode 1 with observations from our two wonderful teachers Lori Howard and Linda Null. We’re very excited that both classrooms were so engaged with Smelly Bill by Daniel Postgate. It’s clear that kids are the same everywhere and that great teachers enjoy learning from each other. Thanks Lori and Linda!
We’ll definitely be doing a Teacher Book Club in the new year — maybe a chapter book this time. We’d love to add another classroom or two, so please let us know if you’re interested.
And now to our teachers…
Lori Howard teaches first grade at Central Elementary School in Okeechobee, FL. She team teaches in a bilingual program, so she has two groups of students – one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The kids alternate into a Spanish-only classroom for the other half day. Central Elementary School is a public school with 500 students in grades K-4. The city of Okeechobee has approximately 6,000 residents and an additional 34,000 people live in Okeechobee county.
Lesson Update:
Last week I sent the Smelly Bill books home with the students to go over the vocabulary words from the story with their parents. I also had the students bring the books back to school each day. After reading Mrs. Null’s blog I liked the idea of looking for other types of words within the pages of the book. She mentioned looking for 5 nouns. I also thought about making a list of the adjectives, verbs and rhyming words. We used the book to practice reading the rhyming words and talk about our “new” big vocabulary words so now we can begin looking for other types of words as well. Great idea Linda!
I noticed a difference between Linda’s approach and my approach to the book. When I first read the book I saw all these wonderful, huge, vocabulary concepts that I knew my students didn’t know. I thought of all the things I could do with the story to help my students learn these concepts. I admired Linda for seeing a multitude of different things to pull from the story.
During one of our activities last week I had the students discuss with their partners things that they would like to tell the author. Blake said, “I think he should make the book a real smelly book like garbage”. Jasmine said, “I would like Smelly Bill to be in a Christmas smelly book with good smells like cookies, and pine trees”. Morgan and Markayla wanted the author to write more stories about Great Aunt Bleach. I think “smells” are a great learning opportunity for first graders. I’m expanding the “smelly” adventure this week as we each write a page in our class book about the smelliest things in the world.
I loved the way Linda was able to use the book and make connections through the content areas. She incorporated her math, English, reading