Here's what we did this week...
In Miss Varrell's Fundations group we began learning about base words and suffixes. We worked with -er, -est, -ing, -ed, -s, and -es. We talked about parts of speech (e.g. noun, verb, etc.) and how certain parts of speech use particular suffixes. We also learned that certain base words that end with -ch, -sh, -x, or -ss will always use the suffix -es. We also discovered that verbs are the part of speech that use the suffixes -ed and -ing most frequently. Next week we will learn how -er and -est are most frequently used.
In Miss Varrell's reading group continued our work with the Making Meaning program and learned how to make frequent pauses in our reading to reflect on what we know and what connections we have made so far. We used "yellow stickies" (e.g. Post-Its) to write our thoughts as we were reading and stuck them onto the pages we were reading. It was amazing to see how often we reflect while we read! We also tried working the same way without using the stickies to see if we could do the same thing without writing our thoughts down. As we learn how to reflect on what we read automatically, we may need to use yellow stickies to help us. Keep some handy at home for homework reading!
In Writing Workshop we learned about descriptive words and how they make stories more interesting and clearer to the reader. We listened to Night In The Country by Cynthia Rylant with our eyes closed. We visualized as we listened to see how Ms. Rylant was able to give us a picture in our minds while she related her story. We noticed how she used words that made sounds, too, like "reek reek reek reek" for frog sounds, "clinks" for the rattling of a dog's collar, "pump" for a falling apple and the word "patter" for rabbits' feet on the grass in the orchard. We wrote stories of our own and circled the descriptive words and phrases we used. We will share our stories next week.
Also, this week we began working on one of our Common Core writing goals: informative writing. We used a type of graphic organizer called a Venn Diagram to help us collect and organize facts about trees. We will use our Venn Diagrams to write paragraphs about trees that we will display on the bulletin board in the hallway. Writing about a nonfiction topic we know allows us to focus on writing skills and not on the content we are writing about.
In enVision math we began working on Topic 4. Topic 4 focuses on working with equal groups including repeated addition and beginning multiplication. We learned about arrays and how arrays form when you group numbers in equals amounts in equal rows. For example:
This array's repeated number sentence would be written as
6 + 6 + 6 + 6 = 24
We also began writing some story problems using repeated addition. The story problems sound much different from the addition problems we wrote before. A repeated addition story problem might look like this:
There were 4 ogres wandering in the forest. Each ogre had 4 whiskers on his chin. How many whiskers do they have all together?
In science this week we finished our Tree unit and worked on completing our tree projects with the iPads. We will focus our attention to nonfiction writing about trees before beginning our next science topic on weather.
Weekend Challenge Activity: Create and write down a repeated addition Halloween story to share with the class. Bring it in on Monday. You may win a chance to record your story and publish it on the blog next week!
F.Y.I.
- Next week we will be having a Halloween/autumn celebration on Thursday, October 31. Please do not send your child with costumes or costume pieces.
- Mrs. Shortell, our room parent, has kindly agreed to coordinate the donation of paper supplies that we will need for our celebration. Please remember that according to Burlington's allergy policy we cannot share food items. Your child should come to school with his/her own snack items to be eaten at our celebration on Thursday. Thank you!
- The cold weather is here! Please be sure your child's outerwear is labeled with his/her name to limit duplicate clothing mix-ups. Thank you!
No comments:
Post a Comment