This text is about a boy and his father who grow things in their garden. At the end, rabbits come into the garden. In this story, we worked on sight words we needed to know to be successful with our reading as well as working on inferencing. Students discussed what the father and his son must have done in order to grow such a garden, how they feel about it and how they felt when they saw the bunnies. They were able to provide evidence for their thinking by answering “what makes you think that?”

Another text we read is called “Boots and Shoes” which told about different kinds of boots and shoes and their purposes. With this text, we focused on main idea and supporting details. We compared and contrasted different purposes for wearing boots and wearing shoes.

In this text, students we worked on tapping out words. In the past, the majority of the words in our texts were sight words or could be deduced from the pictures. We read about two characters (cousins Sam and Jesse) and compared and contrasted what they liked to do at the park in order to decide if they were similar or different. We read to find out if there was anything they could finally agree on!

This text was slightly more challenging as we began to tackle a more difficult level of text. The text is called “Looking for Taco,” about a dog who goes missing. We read the text to find out where Taco went. In the story, they noticed that the dog, Taco, left clues as to his whereabouts. They inferred since most of the stuff was chewed up, perhaps Taco was hungry. Taco was found under the table with his friend Orson and ripped open his bag of food. With this story, we discussed problem and solution.

We used our schema about dogs in order to make predictions about why Meli liked being on the stairs and what other things Meli might bring up and down the stairs. We read to find out what we thought Meli liked the most. We discussed on the last page why the author chose to write the words “down, down, down” in an interesting way. A lot of the students tried that in their writing!

Our first text this week was called “Homes” about different animals and where they live. With this story we talked about main idea and classifying information. Students chose an animal to write about, describing their home and other facts about them.

The second text we read was “Clouds” about two children who saw different shapes in the clouds. We first predicted what shapes the characters might see in the clouds using text-to-self connections. At the end, they saw their teddy bear in the clouds. For writing, we made our own shapes in the “clouds” they made. Students wrote about their clouds.