Mallory’s First Book Report

Mallory loves school. She loves her friends and learning. She loves gym class day, but loves art class day more (much to Rick’s dismay). She loves riding the bus. And she loves grabbing her folder out of her backpack and showing us everything she did at school that day.

On Tuesday, she pulled out her folder and showed me that she had to do a book report. She’d picked out a book about bears, and had a list of questions she could use to come up with three details that she learned from the book. She chose:

1. How does your animal take care of their babies?
2. What does your animal eat?
3. Where does your animal live?

The instructions told us that she could choose to just read the actual chapters that pertained to her animal, so Mallory opened up to the table of contents, and said “This is the Table of Contents…” and used her reading finger to find the right chapters. She first chose “Baby Bears” and went to page 20. Then she actually read the book to learn about baby bears. She needed a little help with some words she was unfamiliar with, but on some words, if I thought she could figure it out – I would stall and she would sound it out for herself.

So, here is her very first take-home-homework-book-report.

Some things to notice:

• See how she colored in the As in the first few words? She is a drawing (font?) freak and is constantly finding new ways to write or decorate letters. It is pretty fun to see what she comes up with when the goal is to draw, but annoying when the goal is to write.
• See how she wrote “tech” for “teach” (and and “ther” for “their” and “clim” for “climb”)? Her teacher explained back in November that it’s OK if they don’t get all the letters when they are learning, and that it won’t mean that she’ll forever think that’s how to spell “teach”. They start off teching, I mean teaching them to write what sounds they hear (so elephant could be spelled “lefent” and turtle “trtl”). It’s really hard to not freak out about stuff being misspelled.
• Because she loves to draw, every detail had to have a drawing with it. I think the F and T on the middle picture is for “front” and “tail”, but I’m not sure.

We absolutely adore her kindergarten teacher and love how much Mallory has learned and grown this year. Since I’m sure that a big part of whether or not you enjoy or not enjoy school has to do with your teacher, we are pretty happy that Mallory’s school career has started off with such a wonderful teacher. :-)