October 19, 2014

Reading
Flexible guided reading groups are under way.  In guided reading groups the students practice the skills/strategies learned during whole group with text that is at their instructional level.  The students also completed their first reading response after watching Mrs. Como write one.  All students focused on their favorite part of the book and why that was important to the story.  

Our first Comprehension Toolkit lesson was about listening to our inner conversation while we are reading. The students watched Mrs. Como as she shared her inner conversation during the book, The Story of Ruby Bridges, and then the students helped share their inner conversation halfway through the book.  The students then practiced this with their guided reading books.  

Sensory images was another topic this past week.  The class learned that good readers use sensory images to help them make sense of text.  Mrs. Como read, Night in the Country, to model for students how recording/thinking about sensory images aids in our comprehension.  The students practiced this with their guided reading books as well.

The students also created genre posters two weeks ago, where they researched a fiction genre and made a poster about the definition and book examples. They presented these to the class.  Check the posters out in our reading corner during Open House!


Math
Two weeks ago, the students learned the partial-sums method for addition and the trade-first method for subtraction.  They also solved number stories with three or more addends.  This past Tuesday was a Unit 2 review day, and the Unit 2 test was on Wednesday.  

The class took a Unit 3 pretest on Thursday.  The first lesson of Unit 3 had the students find an average "class shoe" length to use as a standard unit of measure and then estimate and measure in class shoes. 

Science
The class is studying the moon/phases.  Each week a new set of students is recording their moon observations, and they are reporting back to the class.  The students are also researching questions about the moon, and with the information that they find, they are creating a Wonder Book page.  Another fun thing that the students did was to create a flip book of the moon phases.  Finally, the class is waiting for a sunny day so that they can track the moon in the sky (during the day), just like they did for the sun.

Language Arts
The class worked on revising/editing our What Am I? writing pieces (taking on the perspective of an object in the room), so be sure to check these out at Open House!  We also practiced showing in our writing while responding to other writing prompts.

In grammar we are studying common/proper nouns.

Important Information
Open House is on Wednesday, October 22 from 6:30-7:30.  

The biography genre project is due Thursday, October 30th.  I will send home notecards for this project, so please don't go out and buy any.

The Halloween parade will be on October 31 at 1:30.  After the parade, we will have our class party.

The October reading calendar/log is due Monday, November 3.

Pretty soon, the students will be taking over the class news!  This helps to create ownership of the students' learning.  Each week, I will randomly select two students to write/record the class news, and you will be able to view it on our blog as a video.  Stay tuned!