Trimester 3 - Website Notes

We furthered our love of reading and learning in the library in trimester three! Students continued to develop literacy and information skills through our lessons, read-alouds, discussions and follow up activities. 

This trimester began with several weeks focused on nonfiction text features. Second graders became familiar with several features including :captions, photographs, charts, graphs, maps, labels, diagrams, types of print, headings, glossary, index and table of contents. First grade text feature lessons included: table of contents, diagrams, photographs vs illustrations, glossary, labels and diagrams. Kindergarteners worked to become familiar with: title page, picture, heading. Students learned that readers can gather far more information as a result of reading and understanding these text features in a nonfiction book. 

The majority of this trimester was spent on developing our deeper comprehension skills including: asking questions, visualizing, evaluating the author’s purpose, inferring and making connections. In exploring the author's purpose, students learned to identify whether an author writes to inform, entertain, or persuade. We used the acronym and picture clues of PIE (p=persuade, i=inform, e=entertain). Visualizing was a fun literacy skill all grades practiced…creating mental images by listening to the text and using our background knowledge. Students understand this comprehension skill is especially helpful when reading books with few pictures or just listening to a book read orally with no visual support. Making inferences allowed students to gather text and picture clues from the text, along with their background knowledge to make thoughtful conclusions about the story. All grades practiced making connections with texts…text to self, text to text and text to world. We ended the trimester by practicing retelling stories by identifying key events, important facts, and supporting details. Kindergarten students worked on identifying the characters, setting, problem, solution and key events. First grade students grew the key events to include 4-5 parts of the story (first, next, then, last…). Second graders practiced retelling 5 or more parts of the story with details. 

Throughout this trimester, students continued to build a love of reading while developing critical thinking, comprehension, and information literacy skills that support learning across all subject areas. I encourage your child to continue reading throughout the summer. Putting a daily reading routine in place, even for just a few minutes a day, will continue to strengthen the amazing literacy skills they developed this year in the library. Wishing you a fabulous summer…full of fun reading adventures!