Lower Level December

We read “The Three Pigs.” Students were so excited about this story, as it is one that they all were familiar with. We read to find out how this story was the same or different than other versions they may have heard in the past. This story also has a fluency component, as there is a “script” in the back. Each child took turns reading all of the different parts to practice their speed and prosody of reading. For writing, we wrote about the story using beginning, middle, and end.

With this story, we discussed problem and solution. Meg’s cat named Hugs was stuck up in a tree and Meg had to try different things to help get the cat down. At the end, they realized that the story had a slightly different ending than they predicted. After reading, we wrote about the story using the Beginning/Middle/End format.

In this story, Mother Bear needed to collect lunch for each member of her family. While reading, we focused on sequencing – how the story happened in order. After reading, we focused on problem and solution. We had to make predictions about what Mother Bear would do next to feed her family.

Students loved reading about Orson the dog in “The Good Dog” (it’s their favorite series that we read!) and using text-to-text connections to infer character traits about Orson. We had a discussion about why the author may have titled this book “The Good Dog” instead of “The Bad Dog.” We about our opinion about whether Orson was a good or a bad dog. We supported these opinions with reasons and evidence from the text.

In “What Am I?” we talked about riddles and using evidence from the text to support your predictions. The students noticed that the author did a “terrible job” as one student put it by putting the picture right next to the words. We covered up the pictures and used our brains and our schema to make guesses what the animals were. Another student pointed out that we could write better riddles that gave more detail so students wrote their own (and much better!) riddles. They brought these home this week... I bet you were able to guess their mystery animal since their "clues" were so specific!