We had a great time celebrating our reading today! We enjoyed blue juice and goldfish (to represent the moment when Edward fell into the ocean). We discussed Edward at the beginning of the book vs the end of the book. We created a book about love (a major theme in the book) and watched the movie below. It was a great time!
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I wanted to share with you a piece of our reading lesson from Friday. I think it's an important piece for you to know, as you child will be practicing this truth throughout the year. I told the students, "From now on, when you are thinking about making your reading stronger, keep in mind that you won't get better by reading the hardest book in the world. The truth is that you get better by doing lots and lots of reading in which you really understand the text. This doesn't mean that you read books that are way too easy for you, and this doesn't mean that you never challenge yourself with a text that is a bit too hard. This means that you mostly read just-right boos, and you read whenever you can. If you do that, you will absolutely get stronger as a reader, and you will feel it happening quickly."
Everyday...your child will be the BOSS of their reading life. They need to choose just right books for them, so that they can be the best readers that THEY can be. *Adapted from reading curriculum, MAISA: Launching a Reading Life* We are going to be using a chunk of time on Fridays for book recommendations. Today we talked about the different ways we could recommend the book. Then the students made the expectations for these options. It was fun to watch them interact and hold each other to high standards. We will take some time this week to practice for the upcoming M-Step (formally called MEAP). To do this we will be listening and reading stories and answering questions about each. We will also read articles and respond to them in writing. We are doing these steps altogether in small chunks so that students feel successful when their testing window arrives in late May.
The students are continuing to read and enjoy the genre of biographies. The students are working in small groups to read a biography of their choice. Together they are working on identifying struggles, the cause and effect of events, character traits, time period differences, and accomplishments. Encourage your child to bring home a biography to read with you!
As a class, we have been working on what good biography readers do by reading a biography on Helen Keller. The students have learned that biography subjects want something, but something is in their way. Many times, they have to overcome many hardships before they accomplish their dream. We have also learned that certain things in their life have the cause and effect relationship (just like in non-fiction books). Finally, we discussed how we can describe our subject's life using character traits and backing it up with evidence from the text. It has been a great reading week!
We have spent our time in reading this week learning new strategies to figure out the meaning of tricky words. We have learned that authors are normally really helpful and give us an example, definition, synonym, or antonym to give us clues to what these words mean.
Below are some examples: Example: The river was full of noxious materials like pesticides. Definition: The joey, a baby kangaroo, peeked out from his mother. Synonym: There are many theories, or ideas, about school. Antonym: Although some men are loquacious, others hardly ever talk. We have been reading a lot of non-fiction texts lately! As we read we have been working really hard on previewing the text before reading, making predictions, and reading non-fiction features. Our next step is to paraphrase as we read. To do this we have been stopping at the end of each paragraph and asking ourselves, what key words did we hear in this paragraph? What was this paragraph mostly about? This will help us build up to finding the main idea of a text.
Part of our poetry celebration included Poetry Reader's Theater. Below are links to videos of their performances.
Kyran, Zina, Alivia Christian, Mekai, Clara Shy'Ana, Melanie Alycia, Cam, Hunter, Dylan Alanis, Carly, Adrianna, Marissa, Brysen Ellie, Noah, Seth Silas, Zach Brysen, Carly, Jessica, Marissa, Adrianna Carly, Zina, Alivia Bryson, Joey, Braylon, Ben If you came into our classroom right now during reading, you would notice students sitting near their reading partners, reading the same book, trying to stick to their reading plan, and taking notes along the way. We spend 5-10 minutes towards the end of the lesson having meaningful conversations about our books and what we've noticed.
As we have finished our first (or more) book in the series we are now ready to make some interesting comparisons. We will ask ourselves.... -Is our main character acting in a similar or different way than book 1? -Is our character facing a similar or new problem? How are the solving the problem? -Who are the secondary characters? Are the different or similar from book 1? |
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