January 20-23

This week and next week we will be reading the same Journeys story, The Big Race. We are extending this lesson out for two weeks because I am also using this time to review and also begin our mid-year assessments. I will be retesting – reading, writing, sight words, math and spelling.

In writing workshop this week we worked on writing a story about our favorite food. We drew pictures of our favorite food to help us remember important details to include in our writing. After we wrote we partnered up and helped each other edit our story. We gave feedback about things we liked and things we wished had been included. The students are learning how to give and receive constructive criticism. It can be hard at such a young age to realize that just because someone tells us something we need to work on, doesn’t mean that they don’t like our work or that we are not good at it. I am very proud of our young writers because they are doing a great job at this.

This week in spelling we started our long vowel patterns. We started with long -a and with the CVC-e pattern. Students already have a good basis for how to read words with long vowel pattern CVC-e but we are learning that we have to include that silent -e when we are spelling too. Many times students hear the correct vowel but forget that the silent -e helps make the vowel say its name when it’s a long vowel sound. Next week our spelling words will be all High Frequency words. Since we are taking our mid-year 100 High Frequency Word assessment this week students will have a good list of new words that they can be working on.

In math we continued with our explorations on area, weight and patterns.