Reading and Responding

Wow! We had an excellent time at the Recycling Center! The students participated in a presentation where they learned about all the different things you can recycle, what happens at the center, and what happens to materials once they have been recycled. Did you know you can recycle pizza boxes and the bottle caps?

  

Last week, the students began writing reading responses at home that they shared in class. The students’ responses were amazing and we loved hearing about all of the great books they are enjoying! Reading responses should be 5 or more sentences and include the book’s title, characters, a brief summary, and the student’s thoughts and opinions.

Reading
This week, the students will reread Henry and Mudge Under the Yellow Moon and we will continue to learn about why authors write different genres of text. The students will practice writing questions and statements. Our vocabulary words are: Woods, turned, tops, chipmunks, busy, picked, south, and grew.

Here are some of the students working on their literacy centers.

Later in the week, we will begin the next lesson in our Journey’s series by reading the funny story, Diary of a Spider. The students will study how to determine the cause and effect of characters’ actions and how to form concise summaries. The students will learn about nouns. This lesson’s vocabulary words are: Rotten, sticky, insects, scare, judge, screaming, dangerous, and breeze. 

Spelling
The students will take their assessment on long “u” and short “u” words on Monday. We always review our words and spelling pattern before each assessment. We will continue studying long and short vowel words this week.

Writing
The students are coming to the end of our first Write Trait’s unit on forming strong ideas. This week the students will work on their first piece for their writing portfolios. The students will pick a story idea from their own lives, plan their story, and create a draft for their story. The students will meet one on one with their teacher to form writing goals based on their story draft and then work to meet their goals during the coming weeks.

Math
We will begin Unit 3 this week on place value, time, and money. This unit takes a deeper look at these familiar skills. One of the biggest challenges in this unit is adding up dollars and cents and making sure the decimal point is in the correct place.