Book Talk Tuesday!!

It's Tuesday!! Time to mark another day off of our Countdown to the Last Day of School!  We now have 8 days left!!  (single digits, woo-hoo!!)  Yesterday was EXHAUSTING with our all day long, outdoor Green School Celebration, which I will be posting about tomorrow.  Why not today, you ask??  Well, let me tell you.  Today is the first day of the Book Talk Tuesday LINKY party hosted by Mrs. Deanna Jump!!  I am SO VERY EXCITED to be participating in this LINKY!!  I can't wait to share with you all of my favorite books to use in the classroom (or at least as many of them as I possibly can!!)  I'm going to start off with telling you about a few books I'm reading for my own professional development this summer.  I haven't really had a chance to delve into them yet, so I don't have a lot of information to share with you, but I will be posting about these books off and on all summer, so make sure to keep checking back with me!!

Last summer I immersed myself into The Daily 5 by those amazing sisters Gail Boushey & Joan Moser.  If you have not yet had a chance to check out their awesomeness, you really should!!  Since I read their book last summer, I started the Daily 5 with my kinders this year.  They LOVE it!!  I'm so excited to get it up and running at the start of next year (had some issues getting started this year due to losing my mom right at the beginning of the school year).  So my hopes are that, by reading these PD books over the summer, I'll be able to get my newest focus up and running at the start of next year.

This summer I'm going to be reading up on Writer's Workshop and how I can use it in my kindergarten classroom.  There are TONS of materials out there about this program, but the two books I'll be focusing on are below.  Click the pictures to go to Amazon.com if you're interested!

The first one is Launching the Writing Workshop by Denise Leograndis,  Something I'm excited about with this book is how it is broken down into what you should do daily for the first four weeks of school to get your littles ready to be proficient writers.  I'm also excited that the author included photographs of how each step is tackled in her room, from set up to the last day.

I find these photographs to be SO HELPFUL when I'm trying to understand.  I enjoy having visuals to help with my learning process.  I love how many anchor charts that the author uses, and that is a great way to help students foster ownership of their learning.  Ms. Leograndis is a third and fourth grade teacher, so I will need to adapt some of her lessons to fit the needs of my kinders.  Make sure to check back on Book Talk Tuesdays to see and read about how I'm doing this!! 

In order to help gain a deeper understanding of how writing works with the younger learners, I will also be reading this book:

I am hoping that this book, Scaffolding Young Writers by Linda Dorn and Carla Suffos, will be able to gain a better understanding of where my littles are developmentally with the process of writing.  One of the things I'm excited about with this book is there are plenty of real samples from students as well as plenty of charts that help to determine where students fall developmentally in the process of writing.  I'm hoping that this book will help me to adjust the lessons from the book by Denise Leograndis.  Here's a sample of one of the charts inside this book.

This summer I will be able to dive into these books and begin to develop my lessons for the first four weeks of school.  I hope that you will continue to check back with me to see how I am doing with my self-assigned professional development summer reading!!  (Having to be held accountable via my blog will encourage me to get the reading done!)

Next week I will be Book Talking about one of the children's literature books from my library!  Have a wonderful evening!!

PLEASE don't forget to jump over to Deanna Jump's blog and check out the Book Talk Tuesday linky party!!  Link up and share some of your favorite books, or just cruise through the MANY fabulous educators that have linked up too!!