Word Study: Next week's words continue our study of vowel patterns with short and long i. Our long i patterns are vowel-consonant-silent e and -igh. Our words are: city, gift, think, quit, still, thick, bite, drive, kind, white, bright, and night. Think presents an exception to our patterns because ink makes a long e sound. Kind is another exception as it makes the long i sound, but represents neither of our long i patterns. Additional words you may want to study include: kick, with, mixing, rich, time, dime, light, high, beside, blind, quite, chime, cliff, shipped, chips, print, knit, quiz, mist, ditch, mankind, while, climb, frightened. Students should listen for the long and short i sounds and then attempt to use the patterns. Many students reflexively guess and I am trying to slow them down. I find they often guess quickly and incorrectly but do quite well when they slow down.
We spent a great deal of time discussing nouns as things. I intentionally do not use the traditional definition of "people, places and things" as I find including people and places is confusing when learning the difference between proper and common nouns.
I introduced analogies this week during Word Study. Analogies, like Venn diagrams, are a great way to encourage students to think more deeply about connections. Our strategy for analogies is "relationships," how the words are related. This gives us a great opportunity to include synonyms and antonyms in our Word Study on a regular basis as same and opposite are common analogy relationships.
Reading: We continued to study main idea, topic sentences, and supporting details in reading. We revisited Venn diagrams, connecting them to analogies. Our strategies for using Venn diagrams include: labeling the two halves, numbering our differences so they align with each other, and writing similarities. We also discussed how background knowledge can be very helpful with comprehension, but when we are responding to a passage or text we should rely on the information presented to answer questions or compare. Many students are plowing through their Reading Passports. If your student is behind, I am encouraging them to read at home and bring books in for credit. The two purposes of Reading Passports are to develop sustained reading and to become familiar with different genres.
Writing: We continued to work on single paragraphs and our Writing Essentials (indent paragraphs, skip lines to leave room for revision, capitalize the beginnings of sentences and proper nouns, and end all sentences with punctuation). We have been doing ten minute writings. Students are already producing more work and of a higher quality. Students are checking their writing for the Writing Essentials to develop the skill of self-editing. Convention is a common focus area for most students. We have concentrated on topic sentences and are working to remove the following topic sentence starters:
- I'm going to tell you about...
- One day...
- Once upon a time...
Math: We studied doubles and near doubles this week as addition strategies (as well as zero more, one more, and two more). Students are challenged to identify a strategy as often as they are asked for an answer to a single digit addition problem. We used dominoes to sort for strategies. We are continuing to review place and value, time, number line patterns and number grids. We are also studying minimum, maximum, median (middle), mode (most often) and range (difference between maximum and minimum and I sing a bit of Home on the Range to help them remember this). We are also learning how to make change with money story problems by adding on. Later in the year we will solve these problems using multi-digit addition and subtraction.
Kinesthetic Demonstration of Rock Cycle
October 3rd - 7th: Box top collection
October 4th: Ohio Reading Achievement Assessment (Please do not schedule any appointments for this date)
October 5th: Walk to School Day
October 7th: Fall Family Night 6:00-8:00pm
October 20th: School Picture Retakes
October 26th: Field Trip to Highbanks Metropark
October 28th: End of first grading period
October 28th: Halloween Party (Long lunch, 11:05 - 1:30, most students go home and change into costumes)
October 31st: No School for Students (Teacher Grading Day)
Please send your student's new ukulele in and I will tune it. It will take several days of retuning to stretch the nylon strings before it will hold its tuning. I'll be making tags for their ukuleles to quickly distinguish them. I'm also putting small stickers on the back of the head so we can keep instruments in the right hands.
Please send your student's field trip permission slip to school next week and indicate if you are interested in chaperoning. More information will follow as we near the field trip date. Students should wear layers (no umbrellas please), sturdy walking shoes or boots that can get wet (no Crocs), and a sack lunch that can be recycled or thrown out.
Please sign up for conferences. If you have not, send me an email and I will let you know what time slots remain.
Please let me know if you are interested/willing to help plan any of our four annual parties. We do not have any room parents as of yet. I'm very happy to help plan any of these with you. Our Halloween party is fast approaching. Thank you!
Please write separate checks for all book orders. It speeds up the processing and your student will get their books sooner.
