Celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King

This year, we learned a lot about Dr. Martin Luther King. We read books about his life and we watched videos to learn about all the important things that he did to help our world become a better place. In the United States we celebrate his birthday on January 20th, which is Martin Luther King Day. One of the things we did to celebrate the day was to share our dreams for the future. Here are some of the dreams we shared: I can Dream Like Dr. king. My dream is... "No more smoking because it is not healthy." "To have no hungry children any where." "No more drunk drivers."

This is a song we sang all week about Dr. Martin Luther King. We sang it every morning during our morning meeting.

MLK song from Valerie Ruckes on Vimeo.

We learned a lot about Dr. Martin Luther king. Happy Birthday Dr. King! What did your class do to celebrate Dr. King's dream? We would love to know. Please leave us a comment.

Poetry and Fluency

Each week we learn a new poem to help us with our fluency. This week, we learned a poem called Four Red Apples. Mrs. Ruckes introduced the poem on Monday. We read (or sing) the poem together, each day, during our morning meeting and our reading becomes more fluent. On Friday's we illustrate our poems and place them in our Poetry Notebooks. We hope you enjoy our slide show below:

Four Red Apples 
(Sung to:  This Old Man)

Four red apples on the tree,
Two for you and Two for me,
So-o shake that tree and watch them fall.
1, 2, 3, 4-
That is all!

Four Red Cherries...
Four Read Leaves...

Digital slideshow customized with Smilebox What do you think of our singing?  That's B.T. in the background, reminding everyone what to sing next.

Four Red Apples from Valerie Ruckes on Vimeo.


What are some of the ways you work on fluency in your classroom?

Fluency Poems on Animoto

December Poem-Animoto Fluency Work Each week my first graders practice a new fluency poem during our morning meeting time. The poem is introduced after we read our morning message together. The title of our newest poem is, December. We use poetry to practice our fluency. Poetry is a fun way to practice reading with expression, to learn about punctuation and phrasing, to notice and identify word families, and to work on our word accuracy strategies. At the end of the week, we illustrate our poems, and then we place them into our poetry notebooks. Walking Museum After our poems are illustrated and placed in our poetry notebooks, we share them with our classmates. A fun way to share our work is to have a Walking Museum. During the Walking Museum, we walk around our table groups and notice the great work of our classmates. Daily 5 During our Daily 5 time, we also make good use of our poetry notebooks. We use them during Read to Self, or independent reading. We also use our poetry notebooks during Read to Someone, when we read with a buddy. As you can see, we love using poems to work on fluency. We hope you enjoy our illustrations too. Just click on the Fluency Poems-Video link at the top. You'll see our illustrations via Animoto. How is fluency practiced in your classroom?