Today we reviewed the difference between infinitives and prepositional phrases with a to. I think everyone has a better understanding of those now. We also started our final book for the year, which is Home Sweet Motel by Chris Grabenstein. It should be a lot of fun! We read the first chapter in class and were introduced to our protagonist PT Wilkie who loves to tell elaborate stories!
Today we read aloud part of chapter 9 in Number the Stars. Then we worked on making text to text connections and completing our mentor sentences.
Today we played a review game to review several different grammar concepts. It was helpful for me to see what concepts still need a lot of work. We also learned about interjections. We will start Number the Stars next week, so make sure you have that book ready to go. Please bring it to class, as I will start reading it aloud to them to kick off the reading.
This week, I polled the class to see what was the most challenging thing in the at-home work for the week. They all agreed it was the graphic organizer! I was suprised that it wasn't the Mentor Sentence, but I'm hoping that means that the pattern of Mentor Sentence practice is sticking! So we took the whole class period and worked on filling in our graphic organizers for this week. We shared our ideas with our classmates and generated great sensory language to use in our writing. I know these writings are going to be great!
Welcome back! This week, we started something slightly different. We are focusing more on writing this unit, so we learned how to annotated a passage and look at how the author actually wrote the text. Then we started to apply those things to our own writing.
Today we practiced our listening and following direction skills by drawing a guided drawing of Father Christmas. We will use this next week for a writing activity and to apply to our one pagers for The Girl Who Saved Christmas. Next week is pajama week, so feel free to wear pjs to class!
This week, Dr. Rowe read aloud again and this time we focused on character motivations, quotes, and actions. We learned a new game called Triple Triples. We also worked on our packet this week, so that we wouldn't have a lot of work on Thanksgiving break.
We have two more weeks of co-op! We will have pajama day on 12/9! We'll be doing fun things on that day as well.
Don't forget to sign up for spring semester if you have not already done so!
This week, we worked on listening to The Girl Who Saved Christmas and focusing on tone and mood of our story. Dr. Rowe also modeled the "Think Aloud" process, so that everyone knows how a good reader responds to the reading.
Today we started our Sherlock Room escape. All three groups are moving very quickly through the puzzles (especially once they got the hang of it!). We will wrap that up next week and do some activities related to The Girl Who Saved Christmas. For this week, read The Girl Who Saved Christmas pg. 1-
Today we worked on categorizing statements about Sherlock and then extending those sentences to include bbs, ASBA. This will be a great help to our writing organization. This is the last week for Sherlock! Next week, we will do a room escape and we will beging reading The Girl Who Saved Christmas, which will be our last book for the semester!
Today we worked on syllable division of Halloween words. We then took those words and and practiced our complex and compound sentences by using bbs, ASBA. This week, we're reading the next section of Sherlock Holmes.
Today in class we continued to work on our podcast that we started last week. We are working on formulating good arguments and supporting those arguments with evidence. We wrote a paragraph with our partners. We also worked on learning about inferences. We discussed how Sherlock uses clues to solve mysteries and that is basically what we are doing when we infer! We practiced our inferencing skills using pictures.
Today we listened to a podcast called Smash, Boom, Best, which is one of my favorite podcasts! It is basically a debate podcast that teaches students how to build good arguments. Rather than relying on faulty reasons (like simply saying, "because," this podcast shows students how to use experts and solid evidence to build their case. Today we listened to Vampires vs. Werewolves, which was fascinating (did you know Werewolf stories have been around since 1700 BCE?) Students could clearly hear who had a better debate on the podcast today. We worked on developing strong arguments and taking notes while listening. For homework this week, students need to select their own episode of Smash, Boom, Best to listen to. They will take notes in their packets and write a short paragraph to accompany their selections. They are free to choose any of the episodes except for Vampires vs. Werewolves, since we used that one in class.
October Calendar
Today we played Deal or No Deal with our book. Since we were almost finished with our book, I thought it would be fun to play a little game. Everyone did great with this and we'll probably play again soon. We are finishing up The Wild Robot this week and everyone needs to complete a one-pager project about The Wild Robot. We will do one of these once we finish each book. I am looking for creativity, neatness, colorful images, and creative writing!
Today we worked on adding bbs, ASBA in our sentences. We practiced coordinating conjunction and subordinate conjunctions. We also talked about visualizing while we read and why this is so important. It will be fun to see what we have visualized as we compare it to the movie!
If you are interested in seeing the movie with us, just let me know.
Today we worked on the three sounds of ED. We sorted and looked for the rule so we would know which sound to use when we are decoding. We also learned about voiced and unvoiced consonants! Finally, we played our grid word building game and the pink team won with 15 total words!
Today we played a very fun word building game. Students had a grid of letters and I challenged them to build as many words as they can using only those letters. A good review is that all words should have a vowel! Then we worked on a syllable division game. I also went over my grading scale for returned work (check plus, check, and check minus). This week we are starting The Wild Robot!
Today we learned all about syllables. For some, this was a review, for others, this was brand new! We discussed what a syllable actually was and then how we find the number of syllables in a word. Then we also learned how to divide syllables and determine their type. Students made a reference sheet that they will need for the entire year, so please keep up with it! The at-home work this week is a bit more challenging. It will continue to increase in intensity throughout the year. That's is how we grow smarter and stronger! Reassure students that I just expect them to try their best!
Today we read a pattern-type book called The Important Book by Margaret Wise Brown (you may know her from Goodnight Moon). This book follows a very specific pattern that the students were able to identify quickly. We used that pattern to practice some writing ourselves. We will also be using that pattern to practice writing about ourselves this week. If you need a refresher on the book, you can click here.
Another thing I introduced the students to this week is bbs, which stands for BECAUSE, BUT, SO. We will use bbs ALL YEAR LONG, so I thought it was important to introduce it from day one! When I write bbs, it will always be lower case because (for now) I want students to use those in the middle of their sentences. This will help to increase our blah sentences to brilliant sentences. Students will be practicing this for the next few weeks, but so far, everyone did a great job of practicing with bbs.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to email!