Here are some highlights from a busy week!
In reading, the students are doing a fantastic job of the various literacy tasks involved in the Daily 5. We practice spelling words and sight words, read independently with just-right books, do word sorts based on phonics and spelling patterns, work on writing, listen to reading on RazKids, practice and solidify correct letter formation, and also meet in our reading groups to learn decoding and comprehension skills.
For our comprehension work this week, we read aloud the book Those Shoes by Maribeth Boelts, and focused on retelling the beginning, middle, and end of the story. This story also led to a discussion on needs vs wants, which we will learn more about next week in social studies. We also worked on finding the problem and solution in several stories.
In writing workshop, we are continuing to write our personal narratives and are making our way through the steps in the writing process. Students are now editing their work ("editing makes our writing look right and makes it follow the rules"). We learned about what to look for when editing our work using the acronym COPS, which stands for Capitals, Organization, Punctuation, and Spelling. Students practiced rereading their own work 4 times, looking at each of the four editing points with each reading. Some students are now beginning to publish their personal narrative! The students are excited that their stories will be featured in our class library (and a copy will be sent home, too).
In our journal writing, the focus has been writing three or more sentences on a particular topic. Students have been encouraged to try using time words such as first, next, and finally in their journal writing. This is an introduction to a very basic paragraph and the next step will be to learn how to write a topic sentence.
In math we reviewed the strategy of using the number line to subtract, examined how you can "think addition" to subtract, practiced fact families with larger numbers, and reviewed adding with 3 addends.
In science, we are working on solids, liquids, and gases. Earlier this week we explored various mystery liquids, classified them and used adjectives to describe them, and then tried to identify the liquids using our background knowledge. Today we did a liquid race experiment with glue, syrup, oil, and water to see which liquid would run down a racetrack the fastest and the slowest. We learned the word viscosity!
