This week, we learned about another decoding strategy called "Chunky Monkey". When we use Chunky Monkey, we look for "chunks" or word parts you already know. For instance, in the word little we see the word it-little. We also continued to work on word families using the "short /a/" vowel sound. Check out the books we read this week below!
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.
This week, we continued to use our decoding strategies to help us with unknown words in our texts. So far, we have learned about Eagle Eye, Lips the Fish, and Stretchy Snake, and Chunky Monkey. This week, we learned about Skippy Frog. When we use Skippy Frog, we skip a word we don't know and "hop" back to it at the end of the sentence to try a word that "makes sense" when we are reading. Going back and re-reading is an important strategy to use when reading. When you go back and re-read, you are monitoring your understanding and thinking to yourself "Does that word or sentence make sense."
We continued working on word families by introducing the "short /i/" -it word family word. We will begin talking about the differences that our vowel sounds make. We like writing in our Word Work Journals and making words using our Wilson Fundations Magnetic Boards.
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.
This week, we continue to move and groove before Thanksgiving Break. We are revisiting the decoding strategies we have learned so far including Eagle Eye, Lips the Fish, Chunky Monkey, Skippy Frog, and Stretchy Snake. We are working hard at figuring out unknown words and going back to re-read which helps monitor our understanding.
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.