Strawberries To-Go

When Olivia showed up to hang out yesterday I could tell she had an agenda from the moment she walked in the door. "I'm huuuuuuuungry," she began almost immediately.  "Nuh uh...no way.  We're not making pancakes today!"  She smiled slyly and we talked about her weekend, which she'd spent at the shark museum and "guardando la t.v."  "Oh," I began, "you watched a lot of t.v. this weekend?" She nodded and we wrote the new words on her vocabulary chart with an illustration:

Then we started on our routine:

We checked her homework...remember her travel brochure from a couple of weeks back?

Well she finished it:

Then we moved along to her poetry journal.  She chose a couple of poems to read aloud or recite by heart:

Then we started our new poem of the week, "A Peanut Sat"

As we learned the poem together, we highlighted the rhyming words as well as new vocabulary words, like peanut.

I'm convinced peanut butter is to America what Nutella is to Italy.

Next we went over Olivia' communication journal.  She read aloud the letter she'd written to me:

And while she colored the illustrations for her new poem I wrote her back:

The next item on our learning agenda was the story that she'll read every day this week at home: Click Clack Moo Cows that Type by Doreen Cronin and illustrated by Betsy Lewin.  It truly is one of my favorite children's books of all time--so clever, unique, and beautifully illustrated.

The book begins, "Farmer Brown has a problem.  His cows like to type.  All day long he hears Click Clack, Moo...Click, Clack, Moo...Clickety Clack Mooooo."  Because Olivia had never read the story before, I used one of my favorite reading comprehension strategies called a Language to Literacy chart to get her to interact with the text.

Before reading the story, I asked Olivia to look at the front and the back of the book, and then to make a prediction about what would happen in the story based on what she'd seen.  I wrote her predictions down under the "Predictions" section of the chart.

then I asked her if she knew the definitions of a few vocabulary words I'd preselected and wanted to highlight with her:

All of the words I'd chosen were new to her, so we defined them together and added them to her vocabulary chart:

Proof that literature is the best way to improve vocabulary--
We filled up the vocabulary chart quickly

We read the story together, which Olivia thoroughly enjoyed, then checked her prediction.  "I'm hungry," she pleaded again.  "Oh alright," I said, "but no cooking involved."  I offered her some strawberries, three to be exact.  When she'd finished those we added the last and most important vocabulary word to our chart..."to-go":