Friday, October 15, 2010

A Good Week









This week children have been busy as readers and writers. As we continue to practice the strategy of visualization for comprehending text, students are beginning to understand why they must provide vivid details in their own writing. This realization is helping them to inject their "small moment" stories with subject describers and predicate expanders. This is very exciting!

Using the mentor text Aunt Flossie's Hats (and Crab Cakes Later), students listened to and read a scene without seeing the illustrations. Over two days, they created drawings of the scene, revising and adding details until they were satisfied that they had accurately represented their mental images based on details from the text. We shared these drawings with each other, noticing that each drawing was unique yet they all shared common elements. Finally, we reread Aunt Flossie's Hats with the illustrations showing. It was amazing to compare our drawings to those of the illustrator, James Ransome.

This week we also finished our Judy Blume author study and our first guided reading books, Freckle Juice and The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo. Please look for red folders in your child's backpack this afternoon which house some of the work that they have done in their group. Learning how to respond in writing to questions is a difficult task and one that we will be working on this year.

Dates to Remember
Tuesday 10/19: Third Grade Field Trip to The Lloyd Center
Friday 10/22: Parent/Teacher Conferences (There is NO SCHOOL for students. However, we do include the students in the last 15 minutes of the conference. They can go to the library and be with the ASP program during the first part of the conference).
Thursday 11/11: Veteran's Day-No School
Friday 11/12: Faculty Professional Day-No School for Students

HAVE A WONDERFUL WEEKEND!

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