Resources

This week, we will continue the second unit of study in Arts and Letters to answer the question: "What do people learn by studying animals?"  We will begin this unit of study by asking students to think about their favorite animals and what they love about them.  Through the different books that we read, students will learn facts about different animals and will begin to generate ideas for their own research reports.

Additionally, we will be working on developing good habits of reading.  We will learn how to pick good books, read both the words and the pictures as we read, and to find the title and author of a given book.  These tools will be important as we dive into the curriculum in a few weeks!

Students will learn more about concepts of print, and how literature can help us learn about the world around us.  Our first unit taught the students to see themselves as readers, as they explore the library, and determine goals for themselves as readers.  Out next unit gives the students the opportunity to dive more deeply into texts to begin reading facts and identifying main ideas and key details.

The writing tasks in this unit give the students the opportunity to write about the animals of their choice, but also to write facts about the animals they have learned about in the texts we read!

In Fundations, the students will begin Unit 7 on the glued sounds -ng and -nk.  There are four glued sounds ending in -ng and -nk (ang, ing, ong, ung and ank, ink, onk, unk).   These words are completely phonetic, but require students to tap the glued sounds on three fingers.  Additionally in this unit, we will add the suffix -s to change the words to a plural or to change the verb tense.  Words like banks, chunks, honks, and thinks combine what the students have learned about CVC words, digraphs, bonus letters, and now glued sounds while simply adding the letter s to the end.  The base word stays the same and students will learn to spell these words quickly and easily,

We will use some hands-on activities to build words on our magnet boards and we will use magnetic chips, and we will use some whole body word building to learn about new trick words.  These words are not phonetic and need to be learned by heart.  We will concentrate on the heart part of the word and use these words to fill our sound wall.

The Fundations Unit packets that comes home with the students at the beginning of each chapter has some helpful ideas for word work and trick words at home.  While the activities are completely optional, they provide great ideas for activities to support phonics at home.

In Writing, our students have published their first piece of writing, their Directed Drawing piece.  The students drew a picture of something they were familiar with and used labels in their pictures.  They then wrote complete sentences to describe what is going on in each picture, using capitalization and punctuation like First Grade Writers.  

This week's writing will correspond with our Arts and Letters lessons.  Students will use their journals to write about what they have learned and to make connections to texts and art.  Each activity builds their strength and skills as a writer and prepares them for an end of module task in a few months.  Students will be learning about main idea and key details and will be using their journals to write in complete sentences about what they notice in our reading lessons.

Be on the lookout in our hallway if you are visiting in the coming weeks for examples of their hard work!