We're starting our last week of Ramona! We love, love, love Ramona! The good news is there are a lot of books about Ramona! When we come back from Fall Break, please have the next book in class and ready to read. It is called The Breadwinner and please double check the author. There are several books titled the Breadwinner. You need the one by Arvella Whitemore. You can order here. If you ordered a book from me, I will have those on the Monday when we return from break.
Also in class, we discussed how to write a summary. We also discussed some not so great trends I have been seeing in the homework. I will be a bit pickier in grading the homework moving forward. Here are a few things I am looking for:
-No capital letters in the middle of words.
-Only capital I, proper nouns, and the beginning of sentences.
-There are a few "No Excuses" spelling words. The students should have these on the back of their packet. This means they should not misspell the following words in their packets (so they may need to double check):
friend
really
because
could, would, should
like
Today we learned about Homework Lotto (ask your kiddos!). We also worked in groups to write some responses to the Ramona book. This week for homework, students should read 4-6. Some of our skills this week are characterization, prepositions, organizing our writing, and writing a letter.
Today we started reading Ramona Quimby Age 8. We practice our predicting skills by looking at the cover and trying to decide what was going to happen in this book. Then Dr. Rowe read and modeled the think aloud method. We also talked about what it looks like when someone is reading aloud and how you should follow along. We ended the class by going over our homework for the week and discussing why we should do one page of homework everyday instead of cramming everything in one day. This week's reading is Chapters 1-3.
This week, we worked in groups to answer some critical thinking questions about The Name Jar. We will start our new book (Ramona Quimby, Age 8) when we return from Labor Day. If you did not order the book bundle, please make sure you have that book ready on Monday Sept 14th. We finished up our time together with a Game of Island Trip.
Today we learned about the expectations in Dr. Rowe's class and we also had a little fun trying to rank things in lists and sort out which things do not belong. We also started the story The Name Jar. Students will need to finish this for thier homework this week.
For HW:
1. Listen to the rest of the The Name Jar
2. Work on the homework pages. This is how homework will be delivered this week. I typically send home about 5-7 pages per week depending on what skill they are supposed to be working on. My expectation is that they are working a little bit each day on this work. We even discussed in class that this week's work is less than one page per day. Research shows that repeated exposures to skills are much better for our retention and cognition, so please do not wait and do all the work in one day. Having said that, this is homeschooling, so I understand if your play group meets on one day and you have an afternoon of baking to do. All those are valuable skills as well. For that reason, I don't specifically assign days for you to work on things.