Hello room 75.
Today was another busy day filled with many different learning tasks and activities. Students were very patient this morning as they waited eagerly for the computers to log in and open up Mathletics. (Our system is being updated so things are moving SLOWLY) We are definitely strengthening our understanding of the word "patience". Students are taking their understandings of place value and applying it to their mental math strategies for addition and subtraction. We will be exploring this further in tomorrow's lesson.
After Gym, Mrs. Litman read us a story by Kathy Stinson, called "The Man with the Violin". This book is beautifully written with many descriptive action verbs. After listening to the story, Mrs. Litman had different students from the class act out an action word. The rest of the class had to guess what the word was. By guessing the word and making an incorrect guess, the students were actually increasing their vocabulary of action verbs. For example, if the student who was acting out the word by putting his hands up around their mouth and looking as though they were screaming, the students might suggest the word "scream"; "shout"; "holler"; when in fact the word was "bellow". They now have generated a list of four different ways to say the word scream. While they were saying their guesses, Ansharah was writing down their words so we can use as a reference for our writing. Ask your child to share what some of the words were that were acted and and what some of the guessed words were.
This afternoon was spent with students reading through a large collection of picture books, looking for some favorite poetic language or poems. Working with a partner or on their own, students read through books,and found parts of a story or parts of a poem that they enjoyed reading. Some of them have begun to copy these parts into their writer's notebook. At the end of the lesson, students came into a circle and listened to each other share some found poetry. Introducing them to poetry and poetic language in stories, helps them to recognize what makes for good poetry and will help them to generate ideas when they are asked to write their own poems. In writing tomorrow, we will continue to work on creating a collection of found poetry that they will include in their anthology project that they are working on.
We ended our day by looking at the many different questions the students have come up with in regards to what they want to learn about their Country of Origin. We looked at the questions, and then came up with different categories that their questions can fit into. Working with their table groups they then sorted out their questions. I will work on typing their questions in their categories, which will help them to decide which ones they want to look further into. Thank you for helping your child be so excited about this project. So many came in this morning eager to talk about which country they would like to focus on for their research!! I know that some of the students are asking if they can focus on two. Let's start with one, and then as the questions are decided and the work has begun we can see if 2 would be alright or too much.
Wow, this is a long blog!
Important Information:
November 22 NO SCHOOL PD day.
Homework:
From the book you are reading, find a short passage or part of the book, that you feel the author did a good job of either:using great action verbs; descriptive language; made the piece exciting, interesting or funny; was poetic; then copy this part in your homework journal. This part should not be very long, 2-3 sentences. Please include the title, author's name and date on your page! We will share your selection tomorrow afternoon as part of our writer's workshop.
read 15-30 minutes
mathletics 15-30 minutes
question for the blog:
1) If you have not done so already, please write down your country of origin that you would like to focus on. Remember it should not be a part of North American, it should be the country your family is from before the emigrated to North America
2)What is another word for "said"? (try not to use a word that another student has already written).
See you tomorrow,
Ms. Handelsman
