ELA

Encourage your son or daughter to read each night. Encourage him or her to read WHATEVER interests him or her. Talk about what he/she reads. Let your child see you read. Share reading time...make it fun!

Additionally, we are working on making connections: text to self, text to text, text to world, improving our reading strategies by asking questions, visualizing while reading/listening, making predictions, inferring, drawing conclusions, and identifying the main idea and supporting details.

We are continuing to work on free writing as well as identifying parts of speech (nouns and verbs). I am wanting my students to take a topic and run with it! When we free write we do not focus on grammar, mechanics, or spelling. We want to get our thoughts on paper before those thoughts get lost. Then as writers we go back over our writing and look for capitalization (we only need to capitalize the first word in a sentence and proper nouns...yes, that includes the word "I"). Then we look for ending punctuation. If the sentence is longer than you have air in your lungs, you probably need to go back and find where you could end one thought and start a new thought. We are learning that it is okay to have sentences that end with a period (telling/statement), question mark (asking), and exclamation mark (excitement/command) and it's okay to use all three of them. Finally, we need to re-read. If it doesn't make sense to the person who wrote it, it will NOT make sense to Mrs. Joyce. We work together on spelling.