update 10-20

1st quarter ends today!  We had a great day cleaning out and reflecting on our quarter in writing.  Your child is bringing home a letter today that shows their reflection as writers.  Attached to the letter are some samples of their writing pieces from the quarter.  We also went to the computer lab for kids to choose one piece to further revise and submit for publication (for me to grade).

Early this week, the kids also chose a skill to work on regarding informational text.  See sample work below.  One is on main idea, the other vocabulary, and lastly summarizing.


Annotation is a skill that we have also worked on to show our thinking as reading.  See an example below.

This week in class we finished up informational text with a skill review, summative, informational book talk, and lots of choice reading time.  We practiced presenting our informational book talks to a small group with the goal of getting kids excited and wanting to read our books.  Kids gave each other feedback and should have brought that home to show you.  The book projects were turned in yesterday and fabulous! See pics below.

Next week, we start back into fictional text and will be comparing characters, setting, plot, and theme.  Reading Counts continues into the second quarter and kids will be making goals for themselves based on progress from 1st quarter.  Please check their planners to see their goals.

update 10-11

Next week is the last week of the first quarter!  I can't believe it!  This week, students self-selected a topic to read and learn more about from the choices of:  pollution, eclipses, and climate change.  They read articles with the purpose of reading for causes and effects.  We used Google Classroom to take notes on these topics.  Book projects are due next Thursday, 10/19.

We continue to focus on main idea, vocabulary, text structure, summarizing and looking for details.  Using our informational books, we looked for VIPs or very important points to remember.  This helped us stay focused and remember what the books were about.  See the sample below.

In Google Classroom, we took notes this week which the kids loved.  Check out this sample too and ask your child which topic they learned about.

This week, we also had a day where students self-selected skills they wanted to work on based on some independent work comple

ted in class.  After working on the skill, they had to share with the class what they learned.  We ended with students writing reflections in their notebooks.  See sample whiteboards below.

Reflection:

update 10-4

Reading:  We continue our work with informational text this week.  The two big skills we covered are learning how to annotate plus main idea and details.  This week, are focus was on animals.  Each group learned about either sharks, ants, wolves, or pandas the first half of the week.  Today and into the rest of the week, kids are reading and learning about Gray Whales, Birds of Flight, Life in the Sea, and Plants/Animals of Antarctica.  Not only did kids engage in conversation with each other about their books, but they also learned to Jigsaw.  Jigsaw means to teach others about your topic.  The pictures below show us teaching and sharing about what we read.  Since we are reading informational text in class, your child should be reading 20 minutes each day at home of their choice book.  


Writing:  We continued to work on our expert writing pieces.  Yesterday, we learned what elaboration means and tried it in our writing.  Also, we talked about the difference between run-ons and fragments.  Our goal is to write detailed sentences that clearly share our thoughts.    We completed these on Google Classroom.  Ask your child what he/she wrote about!   Our next writing pieces will  focus on using informational text and more than one source.

 

 

update 9-27

This week, we have moved into informational reading!  Today, we brainstormed all the things that good readers do when reading informational to try to understand it.  Below is what we came up with:

Kids are self-selecting information text on a wide variety of topics to read about.  We read one Monday and today they selected another.  Ask your child what he/she is learning!  The kids also had the opportunity to teach each today about their topics.  It was a great experience for them.

Last week in writing, we did some comparing and contrasting.  We analyzed our writing using different colors to show the different parts.  Once done with this, we reflected on the writing.  The kids wrote compliments to themselves along with suggestions as what could be done differently the next time.  I will pull those out and hand them back before writing our next compare/contrast piece.  See the sample ideas below:



We also started some informational writing.  The kids had to choose some topics that they were experts in and knew a lot about in order to tell someone about it.  Those were started in Google Classroom and will be worked on Friday as well online.  It was amazing to see all the different things our classes know about!

All students did practice and perform idiom plays.  Pictures are below- I forgot to put them on the last update.  Enjoy!