Upper Level February

This was the first text we read in our new reading level! It is called “The Three Bears.” 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 making inferences. We made predictions about what the surprise could be using evidence. We discussed that evidence could be from the text, the pictures, or your schema – what you know in your brain. We used all three pieces of evidence to make a correct prediction as to what the surprise was. On Monday, we will write about the story using the Beginning/Middle/End format.

In this text, Horse was going to have a talent show and wanted to invite other animals to perform. Students had to use evidence from the text to predict what Horse’s talent was going to be. We discussed how evidence can come in the form of the words (text), the pictures, or your schema (what you know). We wrote about our own talents.

Froggy, the main character, notices other animals looking at their baby pictures and he wonders what his look like. Students had to predict how a frog’s baby pictures might look different based on what they know about the life cycle of a frog. They predicted he would look like a tadpole and not recognize himself. We then used evidence in the pictures to predict how Froggy would be able to recognize himself. Each student wrote about what they could do as a baby and what they can do now. We focused on past and present tense verbs.

We then read a text in a series we have seen before. The text is called “A Walk with Meli.” This text featured some sight words we have not encountered in any previous text we read, so we practiced these words before reading. With this text, we focused on main idea and details, talking about what the story is mostly about and the details that tell more about that. We wrote a paragraph to summarize the story and discussed the concept of a topic sentence, three detail sentences, and a closing sentence.

In this text, we noticed a lot of words with r-controlled vowels. When a vowel comes before an "r," the sound of the vowel changes. We sometimes will call this "bossy r" because you hear the /r/ sound more than the vowel. We read to find out how the little girl's feelings changed from the beginning to the end of the text. We wrote about what steps the girl did when planting a garden to help her mom.

We began working on a text called “The Storm” about Bunny who is scared of a storm. She needed her stuffed animal “Hoppy” to make her feel better. We discussed how Bunny was really talking to herself (and not her stuffed animal) when she was talking about being brave. We were able to make connections to our own life to help us understand the character.

We first read "Lizzy." This is a text about a lizard who camouflages. We read this text to find out where Lizzy was hiding and how Ben and Anna could get find her and get her back in the cage. With this text, we focused on problem and solution.

We worked on inferencing skills – what do they think the surprise is and what is their evidence for thinking that? We used our schema and the text to correctly infer the characters were making soup for the mom. Students took it even further to say that maybe they were making soup for mom because she was sick.