Students read an autobiography that I wrote on myself as an example to their autobiography writing. We looked at title, paragraph formations, indentations, topic and concluding sentences and detailed sentences. Students saw a graphic organizer of a paragraph that used an illustration of the parts of a hamburger. The buns were the topic and conluding sentences. The tomato, patty, and lettuce were the detailed sentences related to the topic sentence. Students used the interview answers that our parents completed on their child to help them write the detailed facts about themselves in their autobiography.
We continued with read to self and listen to reading times daily. Students learned about 'Scooping Up Words Into Phrases' to help them sound more fluent while they read. I read aloud a poem without scooping and with scooping. Students then shared how different the 2 ways sounded. We also talked about the bad habits we can have as readers, such as, The Freeze (we stop reading at a difficult word), The Tell Me (we ask others to read the hard word without stretching it out ourselves), The Mumble (we mumble the word instead of reading it) and The Nonsense (we make up words that don't make any sense in the story). We discussed the importance of dropping these bad habits but choosing good reading habits instead. Some good habits are stretching out the word, saying the first letter sound aloud, trying both short and long vowel sounds, and more.
To help us learn more about ourselves and each other, students wrote an acrostic poem using their first names. After seeing my acrostic poem as an example, we also brainstormed some words that we could use to describe us. Students also chose to use words that describe some of their favorite things. Great job, poets!
We have started to talk about Character Study in more detail. After I reread the story, Surfer Chick, we studied the main character and listed words that describe her looks, actions and character traits.
Math
These past two weeks, we have been studying fact families. We discussed how numbers are related with each other just like our own families. We used unifix cubes to explore how three numbers are related together by adding and subtracting. Students started to grasp the fact that as two numbers join, the result is the greatest number of the three numbers and that numbers can subtract from the greatest number of the three. Students are still exploring how numbers are related as we talk about higher numbers.
Engineering with Ms. Merrill
Engineering with Ms. Merrill has been so much fun! Students have been using word banks, sketching designs, and building creations using different tools. Ms. Merrill reads aloud stories to motivate and inspire students to build designs and express their creativity and innovation. We are excited to continue to explore and experience engineering concepts!