What a DAY!!!!

Wow! We had a great day today at Langston Magnet. We are learning about the parts of magazines and also celebrating being DRUG FREE!!! Did you know that a page number is not called a page number in a magazine???? A page number in a magazine is called a FOLIO. Is that weird or what? We also learned that the blurb (tells what a book is about) on the back cover of a book is like the DECK in a magazine. The deck tells what the magazine article is about. AND, the words in bold type are IMPORTANT to the article. Boy, did we learn a lot today.

We also celebrated being DRUG FREE today with our DRUG FREE peprally. All of our classes participated by making signs and coming up with their own class cheer about being DRUG FREE. Everyone got to perform at the peprally. Ms. Murray's 5th grade class got a POPCORN PARTY for best participation in the DRUG FREE activities this week. The kids and classroom teachers did a GREAT JOB!!! We hope that you celebrate with us and make a commitment to be DRUG FREE! Have a great weekend!!!

Donna Smith

RECIPE for Enrichment

The kids have been working on organizing an afterschool recipe book called Recipes for Enrichment. We hope to have it finished next week. Tuesday, we made popcorn balls from one of our recipes. Everyone in afterschool will get one Wednesday for snack (we didn't quite finish making all 100 popcorn balls). The recipe is so easy that we would like to share it with you here:

Afterschool Popcorn Balls

1/3 cup popcorn kernals (3 1/2 quarts already cooked popcorn)
1 - 10 oz. bag of Marshmallows (if you use the 16 oz. bag, pop more popcorn)
1/4 cup butter or margarine
Wax Paper

1. Melt the butter and marshmallows together in a bowl (we used the microwave). After the marshmallows and buter are melted, stir until the mixture is well blended.
2. Pop the popcorn and put in a large mixing bowl, this allows the marshmallow mixture time to cool some.
3. Pour the marshmallow mixture over the popcorn and stir until all the popcorn is well coated with the sticky stuff.
4. Form into balls and lay them out on wax paper to dry

(Hint - After the popcorn balls dry, we put ours in sandwich bags to keep them fresh)

We hope you enjoy our special Afterschool Popcorn Balls as much as we did!!! Pictures of us making our snacks will be up shortly!

Mrs. Smith, Ms. Clark and After School Students

Website

We are currently trying to update our website to be more helpful to the parents, students, teachers, and community members. If there is something that would be helpful to you or something that you would like to see included on the website, feel free to leave a comment and we will see what we can do to get the information included. Already, there are links to the district lunch menus, edline, the learning institute and other sites that may be helpful for keeping up with grades, food choices, and Benchmark and Chunk Test scores.

Please be patient as we are building the site, it takes a lot of time; but check back often to see what we have added. New items will be added daily. We are very excited about the website and the information and helps that will be offered for our school community members.

Have a great week!
Donna Smith

Parent/Teacher Conference

Woo-hoo, our first nine weeks is at an end, and we have had some outstanding reading going on in the classrooms and in intervention. We learned about narratives (texts that tell a story that's make believe). Some of these included fables, fairy tales, tall tales, folk tales, realistic fiction stories, mysteries, and historical fictions. Now we are into our practical and informational reading cycle where we are learning about brochures, newspapers, magazines, atlases, maps, and reading instructions as well as lots of other kinds of practical texts.

In after school, we are making recipe books, and next week we will be making popcorn balls for everyone involved in afterschool tutoring. Talk about FUN practical reading skills! I can hardly wait.

We are looking forward to seeing all of our parents and guardians at parent/teacher conference so that we can show off the neat things we have been doing. We hope everyone will come!

Have a great day!
Mrs. Smith and students

Animal Strike at the Zoo. It's True!

Animal Strike at the Zoo. It's True! by Karma Wilson (Author), Margaret Spengler (Illustrator) is a very cute picture book about zoo animals being tired of the same old day to day goings on at the zoo. They go on strike to try and get better conditions for themselves. It is really a very good example of a book appearing to be simple, but actually includes several different types of text. The book tells a story so is classified as narrative/fiction genre. It includes different types of practical text such as signs and newspapers within the narrative. Another twist to the story is that it rhymes! It is very neat and can be used for various lessons. Great descriptive language is included. Read and enjoy this book. Your kids will love it!

Donna Smith

Practical Reading in Narrative Books

Practical reading is our next cycle at Langston. We will be working with texts that inform and help us in our everyday life. We will be reading recipes (and cooking), looking at brochures, reading maps, instructions, and how-to books. One of the things that we looked at today is how books of different genres can be combined.

We read a book by Aaron Reynolds (Author) and Paulette Bogan (Illustrator) called Chicks and Salsa. It is a cute narrative book about some barnyard animals getting tired of eating the same old thing until a rooster helps them find satisfaction in some southwestern cuisine. The thing that is so great about the book is that it is a crossover between narrative and practical texts. After you learn about the different kinds of southwestern food that the aninals eat, they give you the recipes in the back of the book with a little humor built into the instructions. The recipes sound especially yummy! If you haven't read Chicks and Salsa, you are missing a treat. The students loved it, especially the quackamole! OLE'

Donna Smith

Lester Laminack

Today I was priviledged to meet and listen to author Lester Laminack. He is a wonderful author of children's books that include, my favorite, Saturdays and Teacakes. He schooled us on the craft of writing as well as how children should be taught the love of a good book. He was totally awesome. If you get a chance to see him or have him at your school, make sure you attend his seminars because you will laugh, cry, and be totally awestruck by the man. No wonder his books are such joys to read to children. He, himself, is a joy to be around. I could have listened to him all day! Pick up one of his books and enjoy his craft, then, pass it on or share it with a friend!

Here is Lester's home page. Visit his site!

http://www.lesterlaminack.com/

Donna Smith

TGIF

Whew! What a busy week we have had! We started after school tutoring, had space night and taken chunk tests in the 4th & 5th grades the last two days. I am certainly ready for the weekend.

Next week, we will have 2nd and 3rd grade chunk tests on Thursday and Friday. Then we will begin our practical cycle. I am really excited about that. We will be reading recipes, brochures, newspapers, magazines, instructions, cereal boxes, and how-to text. It is really a fun time for us as well as the students. We will be working on this in after school also. We are all ready to start something new!

Donna Smith

Chunk Tests

Our first round of reading chunk tests began today. We were assessing narrative reading to see how well the students have learned what we've been teaching since school started. The teachers and the students take the tests very seriously and try very hard to do their best. We will start analyzing the data that we get back to find out if we need to reteach any areas the students didn't perform well on the tests.

Tomorrow is the narrative writing. We'll be assessing how well our students can write stories. It may be a story about something that's happened to them or maybe having them make up something. We will be looking at how they put the stories together, if they included detail with descriptive language, and of course, grammar, punctuation and capitalization. I hope all the students write stories down as well as they tell them!

Good luck on the tests!
Donna Smith

After School Program

Langston's After School Program got off to a great start yesterday. We are serving 100 students after school in a variety of courses. We have the usual reading, math, and science, but there are also enrichment classes where the students do fun activities, field trips, cheerleading, etc.... The students are really excited about it and so are we.

Ms. Sharon Clark, the K-2 Intervention Teacher at Langston and I (3-5) have 18 students for enrichment class and 15 for reading. Our students are creating stories in a bag. They have to read a book and then create props from the story that will help them with retelling it. They are going to use the props to tell their stories to the 1st and 2nd graders in after school.

We are also planning on working in some practical reading in our enrichment class. Word has it that recipes are going to used to make some neat snacks for after school students on Halloween.

Read, Believe, Succeed, Achieve
Donna Smith

JUNIE B. JONES

WOW! What a busy yesterday and today. Our 1st and 2nd graders got to go to Little Rock to see Junie B. Jones. They had a really great time. The teachers were as excited as the kids were. I told them that my favorite Junie B. book is Sneaky Peek Spying. I think it should be the next show they make!

We had space night tonight. Students and their families came to Langston, and we got to share books on space. They got to make airplanes, do a communications exercise with legos, make and eat space cuisine, go into the Star Lab, and shoot rockets outside. We all had a really good time!

This week my students have been practicing test-taking strategies and getting ready for our chunk tests at the end of the week. We are working on narrative reading and writing. Our favorite narratives so far are: A Bad Case of Stripes, Amazing Grace, Chrysanthemum, Stand Tall Molly Lou Melon, Chicken Sunday, and The Big Orange Splot. If you haven't read them yet, you need to get them!

Donna Smith

Helps for Identifying Unknown Words

In my classes, we have been working on strategies that help us identify words that we don't know. The students came up with lots of good ideas, and I thought I would share those with you. If you can think of anymore, please add to our list.

Helps for figuring out words we don't know:

1. Break the word into chunks.
2. Sound out the word IF the word is a one syllable word OR sound out the parts after breaking the word apart.
3. Find a word within a word. example: demand (man, an, and)
4. Use your fingers to cover up parts that you already know and try and figure out what's left.
5. Look at the pictures.
6. Leave out the unknown word.....read the whole sentence without the word to see if you can figure it out. (Context Clues)
7. Use a dictionary.
8. For use only after 1 - 7 have been tried, ask the teacher or another student.

We hope this helps you as you come to words that you don't know!

Donna Smith and students

Read for the Record - Corduroy

Reading took front and center today at Langston because we were reading for the record. Teachers all over campus were reading and giving lessons on friendship using the book, Corduroy written by Don Freeman. This is a program by Jumpstart and takes place all across the U.S. The following is taken from the Jumpstart website:

"Jumpstart’s Read for the Record is a campaign designed to bring attention to the importance of early education. By encouraging hundreds of thousands of children and adults to read the same book on the same day, Jumpstart aims to break a world record and to make early education a national priority.

Once again, children and adults read together at events nationwide in an attempt to break the world record for the largest shared reading experience in history! This year’s campaign took place on October 2, 2008, in schools, libraries, stores, hotels, playgrounds, offices, and homes across the country."

For more information go to: http://www.readfortherecord.org/

We had a great time with a wonderful book. If you haven't read it yet, you need to!!!

Donna Smith