Mrs. Manning's Go Blue Readers are hard at work this week! Word Work, and Fluency, and Writing...OH MY! We have been practicing applying our decoding strategies to figure out unknown words. When students try to figure out an unknown word, they are asked, "does that look right?" or "does that sound right?" or "does that make sense?" You can ask your child those questions when they attempt to figure out an unknown word when reading at home. This week we have also worked with short -e, -et word family words. We have also began a strong focus on comprehension strategies. We know that "Rockstar Readers" can not only read the words but also talk about the books we are reading. We have been completing graphic organizers, First/Then/Last Flip Books, and re-telling our stories through writing in our journals. #proudteacher.
In this text, we worked on making predictions based on connections and schema. We also discussed the concept of cause and effect. With this story, we focused on retelling and writing about the main idea using the format of: Somebody – Wanted – But – So – Finally.
In this story, we focused on classifying information and text structure. We discussed that some animals hibernate while others migrate. We talked about why the author chose to write the story in the way that he did to help us categorize the information.
WE LOVE READING! This week, we will focus on fluency and prosody when reading. We will pay close attention to punctuation including exclamation marks, question marks, and quotation marks. We will also continue focusing on word families as well as nonsense words when building/writing words. When reading to your children at home, it is a great idea to read with a lot of expression emphasizing the dialogue in text and where the exclamation marks are. You your child's best model! :) Also, continue to talk to your children about the books, word families, and writing that we are doing each day in Go Blue. Our word family focus was -en word family words.
The first text we read is called “The Gecko that Came to School.” They LOVED this story because it was so silly to read about a girl sneaking her pet gecko into school. We focused on action verbs and suffixes. We discussed predictions based on the words in the text and hypothesized what could happen next, as the story seemed to end abruptly. We also discussed problem and solution.
Hugs the cat keeps bothering everyone in his family. They come up with a plan to entertain Hugs. With this text, we worked on writing using the Somebody-Wanted-But-So-Finally model.
In Go Blue this week we will be focusing on reading for meaning. We will pay close attention to stories while reading so we are able to answer questions about the text both literally and on an inferential level. We will talk about the sequence of texts, using words like First, Next, Then, and Last. We will be talking about how stories have a problem and a solution. We will be making connections with the characters in the story and writing about the stories we read. We will also continue our phonics/word work with a focus on the -ed and -ell word families.
In this text, Bear wanted to throw himself a birthday party but forgot something very important. With this story, we focused on sequencing.
This text was another fun one in the "Froggy Series." In this text, readers had to predict why Froggy was picking all the cherries and make predictions about what would happen at the end of the story with his friends.
It is hard to believe that we are already approaching March! February has been filled with the LOVE of reading during Go Blue. We continue to use various strategies to help us with unknown words and we are trying to use these strategies in our writing as well. This week, we are focused on re-telling the story in our own words and written responses to the texts we are reading. We do this in a variety of ways. Sometimes, we create our own written responses to a prompt, sometimes we use sentence starters, and often times we answer questions practicing using complete sentences. Practice at home building your child's comprehension both literally and inferentially not only by asking questions about the books, but also having your child write about what they are reading. We will continue to challenge ourselves and build our writing STAMINA! :) This week we are also working with short -u word families such as words like cut, hut, gut. We sorted words in our word family journals.WOW!! Please check out the books for the week below!
With this text, we discussed nonfiction text features. They loved reading about the different types of boats. We talked about main idea and supporting details.
We continued with our non-fiction text study by reading "All About Chimps." We talked about how the headers helped tell us what we were going to read about and to organize information. We learned many facts about chimps: about their bodies, what they do, what they eat, and how they live.