Mrs. Spy Comes to Town- Living Anchor Charts

My dearest friends, I've come to tell you the power of voice and characters.  Sometimes when you are busy trying new things, you tend to forget to come back to the basics and just play with the kids.  I wanted to jazz up my reading and keep the kids engaged, so I just started using voices and characters, much the same as they do in the book Interactive Think Alouds.  (Thank you Kerry!)  Of course, it's best when you take the idea and make it your own.  (and drum up a bit of courage.)

I went in the hallway, put on a pair of  plain, fake glasses, used a Julia Childs' high pitched voice and used pictures to read pages.  In the next days that ensued, I went through the room with a discovery voice "oooooh....look at this!  I found the ER sisters!  And over here I found  the Quiet Brothers -  pointing to SH."  Each day I highlighted a new feature: the  alphabet cards, the chunk cards, resources and reading clues all around our room. 

These are now my "living anchor charts."  I KNOW these kids are connected to these cards because they keep helping each other refer to them, saying, "remember when Mrs. Spy showed us where the ER sisters were?"    I will keep referring back to these cards and charts to keep re-remembering what we've learned.

The coolest part of  my adventure was that I pretended that I had totally forgotten my name, and the kids named me, further engraining my character and anchoring our reading work.  They look for Mrs. Spy every day and tease me saying, you look a lot like Mrs. Wallace.  And, "hey, you're wearing the same clothes!"  There's still magic in first grade.  I love their joy.

The interesting part is that it doesn't matter what the prop, nor how big or fancy it is.  It's different and fun and therefore, engaging.

I have a funny feeling Mrs. Spy will be back in the future to continue our "living anchor charts."
:)