Week 6

Post date: Aug 05, 2009 6:4:29 PM

The word of the week is "decompose." We've been talking and reading about recycling, reducing, reusing, saving our planet, deforestation, and compost this week. Our weekly magazine this week was called Garbage and included many articles like Crazy for Compost: How to Make a Compost Heap, A Chance, Quick Response, A Field Guide to Recycling, Make Mine Plastic, and The Tale of a Garbage Barge. We've also reviewed prefixes and suffixes (word beginning and endings), parts of speech (adjectives, nouns, verbs), story sequence, writing paragraphs, summarizing, homophones (sound the same, spelled differently), and different types of fiction and nonfiction. We use Mad Libs as a fun way to create stories and review the parts of speech. Try creating a Mad Lib with your child at home using http://www.eduplace.com/tales/ . We also reviewed adjectives using a fun website that lets you create Word Art, http://www.wordle.net/create.

Try creating your own Word Art:1. Type your name 6 times.2. Type in 6+ adjectives that describe you.3. Click "Go."4. If you want to change the font, pick a new font/background color, or rearrange the words, click the appropriate columns on the screen. Clicking "Randomize" will show you many fun possibilities!5. To print, just click "Print."Our weekly book this week was The Great Kapok Tree, written by Lynne Cherry. This story is beautifully illustrated and shows the importance of rain forest conservation. It tells the effect of deforestation from the animals' point of view. A man falls asleep while chopping down a kapok tree. The forest's inhabitants (snakes, butterflies, a parrot, a jaguar, sloths, and a child) whisper in his ear about the terrible consequences of living without trees. The man wakes to see the creatures staring at him as he goes back to finish his wood-cutting job. His experience with the forest animals causes him to change his mind, and he never cuts down another tree again. Summer school progress reports will be sent home on the last day of summer school. The summer school goal was to have a higher performance score on the post-test than on the pre-test that was given on the first day of summer school. These tests included the areas of Oral Reading (reading a story and decoding unknown words) and Retelling (comprehension, sequence, main events, answering questions about what you've just read). If your child scored higher in these areas on the post-test, then he/she met the goal. If your child did not score higher on the post-test in these areas, then summer school goals were not met. Comments are attached to each progress report that include strengths and areas of difficulty. If summer school goals were not met, continue to work with your child on the areas of difficulty and congratulate him/her on the progress and hard work this summer.