Week Five

Reading

This week the students read a nonfiction story called My Family and we worked on the comprehension strategy of comparing and contrasting. They used the My Family story to create a Venn Diagram comparing their family to the family in the story. We also worked on using a glossary to help us understand harder terms in a text. The students had a blast flipping through nonfiction books and looking at all the different glossaries! We learned a lot about volcanoes and hurricanes from those books! The students learned how to make complete sentences this week which built upon their knowledge of subjects and predicates. Next week, the students will work on identifying the author’s purpose for writing different texts, using context clues to find the meaning of multiple meaning words, and writing statements and questions. Our vocabulary words will be from the story Henry and Mudge, Under the Yellow Moon. Vocabulary words: Woods, turned, tops, chipmunks, busy, picked, south, grew. 

Here are some of our readers working hard!

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Daily Oral Language

This week the students began our Daily Oral Language lessons (also known as D.O.L.) During these lessons the students work together to find mistakes in sentences and paragraphs. We work on starting each sentence and proper noun (name) with a capital letter and ending with punctuation. D.O.L. lessons also review the spelling and phonics skills we have studied and introduce new grammar skills. The students love working together to find and fix all of the mistakes!

Here are the students talking about the mistakes they found in a paragraph about Jane Goodall.

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Spelling

This week the students studied words containing the long and short “i” sounds. The students also had two words on their list that were from their 250 High Frequency Word list. The “250 words” usually will not fit the spelling pattern we are studying but are the most common words the students will need in their writing. Next week, we will study words containing the long and short “o”  sounds, like dropped and envelope. 

Writing

The students are working on adding details, details, and more details into their writing. They are encouraged to include details about colors, shapes, sizes, textures, smells, tastes, and more so that their readers can picture what they are describing! Next week, the students are going to choose a food to describe with as many details as possible, then the other students are going to see if they can guess which food they are describing! 

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Math

As we completed our first math unit, the student practiced using calculators, worked on place value, reviewed counting coins and dollars, and continued working on telling time to the minute. Reading clocks is a skill they can practice outside of school all year long! This week we built “base ten structures” out of cubes that are grouped into ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands. After building their structure the students had to count up their pieces to find the total number of cubes used. In our next math unit, the students will work on addition and subtraction number stories (word problems) and quickly adding doubles like 8 + 8!

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Here are some of our mathematicians using dominoes to practice their simple addition facts! img_0381 img_0383