Week 22

This week we read books, we played games, we laughed, and we learned! I think it was a week well spent!

Reading

The students read a story called Violet’s Music. In this story the students came across some challenging words that they have learned can be broken into smaller pieces. The students are on the hunt for words that can be broken into consonant-vowel-consonant (or CVC) chunks! For examples, we read the word kindergarten, which can be broken into kin-der-gar-ten, and then read smoothly as the complete word- kindergarten. We learned that breaking these multi-syllabic words into smaller pieces can turn a challenging word into easy to read chunks! This is a great strategy for the students to practice when they are reading at home or even when driving around town reading signs!

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Spelling

This week the students studied words that need “es” added to the end to make them plural. We learned that words that end in ch, sh, s, x, or z need “es” added to the end. We will continue practicing this skill during our sentence and paragraph editing lessons throughout the year. 

Vocabulary

The students read a yummy pineapple pancakes recipe as part of their vocabulary unit this week. We learned that the “How-to” or procedural genre includes many types of directions and recipes. This type of writing is often accompanied by a list of needed ingredients or supplies and then the steps you need to follow. Next week, the students will read a folktale and learn the following words: Agree, bare, famous, feast, gentle, hero, leader, notice, search, and weak. We will also be discussing homophones, words that sound the same but mean different things, like bare and weak.

Writing

The students brainstormed new writing topics this week and made plans for their stories. The students are learning to use quotation marks in their stories to show where their characters are speaking. Here are some of the rules they have learned about using quotation marks: 

-Quotation marks only go around what the character is saying out loud.

-The first letter of the character’s talking needs to be capitalized.

-If the quotation marks are at the end of the sentence, a comma comes before them,  like this-   Jessie said, “Nice job!”

-The punctuation comes inside the quotation marks, like the exclamation point in the previous example.

We will continue practicing these quotation mark rules as the year continues.

Math

We have begun two challenging math topics: Subtraction with regrouping and multiplication! To introduce the students to subtraction with regrouping we are having them use hands on materials (like blocks) or use drawings to guide their thinking. A number needs to be “regrouped” when there is not enough “ones” in the bigger number, for example: 22 – 19. We know 22 is bigger than 19, so you can definitely take 19 out of 22, but when you stack the two numbers on top of each other suddenly the 9 is supposed to come out of the 2! This is where working with blocks and drawings, so that the students can see the number actually being taken apart and regrouped, becomes so helpful. The students have also begun working on beginning multiplication skills by grouping numbers into arrays, or rectangular patterns of dots. You can think of eggs in an egg carton as a 2 by 6 array. When you count up all of the eggs you have 12, so 2 x 6 = 12. We will continue working on both of these skills next week!

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