Reading: We concentrated on characters and questioning in our reading. We continue to write questions before, during and after we read books. We read another readers' theater based the Folk Hero, Johnny Appleseed. This helped us improve on fluency and expression. We worked om strategies that great readers use when they get to a tricky word. We were word detectives and we searched for nouns and verbs. We finished our read aloud class chapter book... DONOVAN'S WORD JAR. We toured the building with our handy notebooks to joy fancy words we saw and heard, for later use in our stories. We read Swamp Monsters and Go West Swamp monsters. We learned about idioms....figurative language. Some of the kids are reading in  a Merrill series and have different stories with the same strategies. On challenging skill this past month and one that will be ongoing is finding the main idea of a page or chapter and the details to support it.

 

Writing:  We completed our Autumn walk stories and continued with small moment personal narratives this week. The kids listened to examples in books, as well as their friends' small moments. We concentrated on the nouns, adjectives and verbs authors use and each day we revised to make our writings interesting. We added sound words too! We made a chart of words to use in place of "nice," "good," "fun," "cool.  This is another way to spice up our stories and increase our vocabulary. We continued Newsbooks! Thank you for your support in responding to your child's letter each week. We also read Punctuation Takes a Vacation. This great books shows use what happens without punctuation.

 

Math: We reviewed place value, estimating and inequalities.We learned about growing patterns and we found more challenging patterns using our hundreds chart. We began word problems where we are concentrating on the process more than the correct answer. We are sharing our thinking out loud and seeing that there is more than one way to get to an answer.  The Format is: 1. Understand...what is the problem asking me? 2. Plan...will I add or subtract and what tool will I use? 3. Solve with pictures and then a number sentence to match. 4. Check answer. We continue tofind  many combinations for the number of the day.  For example, for 32 days in school we could have 10+10+10+2.

 

Word work: Out new red words were: because, there, sure, one, none, done, what.  Our blends were "pl" "gl" "bl" "cl." We learned the pattern for all long vowels with a magic "e" and a consonant. An example of each is...cake, kite, bone, flute, concrete