Week Six

We had a very busy week and learned so many new things! This group of students LOVES learning! 🙂

Reading

This week we read another Henry and Mudge story and worked on figuring out the author’s purpose for writing different texts. If your child is enjoying reading about Henry and Mudge, we have the whole series in our classroom and it is written at level “J”. The students worked on identifying questions and statements and next week they will learn about other types of sentences like commands and exclamations! We also learned how to put commas in a list. For example: The delicious honey was from Jack, Heidi, Molly, Lily, and Israel! The students often need reminders to not put commas after the “and” in the list.

Here is one of our “teachers” helping us edit sentences and paragraphs!

We played some fun phonics games this week where the students had to race to sort long and short vowel words. We called this phonics game “Excuse me” because of how much the students bumped into each other and had to say excuse me! 🙂 The students have learned that when you see a silent “e” on the end of the word that word is going to contain a long vowel sound, for example: Excuse, game, hope, and state. We also practiced reading the long vowel sound in words that contain a double “e” in the middle, like meet and street. These skills matched up very well with our first spelling lessons so we decided that we can now read and spell these words correctly!

Here are some of our readers scrambling to sort long and short vowel words:

Next week, we will read a funny story called Diary of a Spider. The students will work on finding the cause and effect of things that happen in a story. We will also work on using context clues to identify the meaning of unknown words. The students will hunt for nouns (people, places, and things) in their books. Our vocabulary words are: rotten, sticky, insects, scare, judge, screaming, dangerous, and breeze. 

Spelling

This week the students worked on words that contained the long and short “o” sound. Next week, the students will study words containing the long and short “u” sound, like absolute and just.

Writing

We are working on picking one idea, that we know a lot about, and writing about that idea using tons and tons of details. This week the students picked a “mystery food” that they described with as many details as possible. The students were not allowed to tell their audience the name of their food! The students will share their writing with their peers next week and we will see if we can guess their mystery food based on the writer’s use of details! I have read some very detailed writing about pickles, pomegranates, oranges, cotton candy, ice cream, and more! Next, we will be writing stories about something from our own lives and filling the story with details so that it comes alive for the reader!

Here are a few of our writers hard at work!

Math

The students worked on writing addition number stories. These word problems require the reader to add up two addends to find a sum. We have begun using the term “sum” to describe what you get when adding. The students are working on many different strategies that help them add more efficiently. We let them know it is fine to use whichever strategies work best for them to add up the numbers quickly! This week we also used dominoes to help us practice our math facts by quickly adding up the dots on each side.

Below the students are playing a game called “Beat the Calculator.” They are trying to solve addition problems faster than the student who is solving the same problem on a calculator.