Happy Friday everyone! We have had a wonderful week here in SBS 3. Children have been busily reading, writing, and computing.
In writing workshop, students have published their first personal narratives. This is the culmination of lots of work and creative inspiration. Each of these stories is based upon a "small moment" in the children's lives. Each student identified the setting, main characters, the wish, the problem, the turning point, and the message in these small moments before beginning to write. Using the computer program Kidspiration, they webbed their ideas and then sequenced the story from beginning, to middle, to end. After editing and expanding their sentences, children illustrated the story using another computer program called Kid Pix. Finally, each student recorded their narration of their small moment story on their laptop. Soon we will post this work to our blog. In addition, take a moment to look in your child's writing folders in the classroom to see the various stages of writing and editing.
In reading workshop, we are in the middle of the first chapter of Santiago's Silver Mine. This novel is set in Mexico in an old mining village. The main characters of the story are two boys, Santiago and Andreas, who are trying to help their families make ends meet due to a poor harvest year. In their attempts, they encounter much adventure and become embroiled in a mystery that needs solving. As we read the story, we are answering comprehension questions in writing. This process can be tricky and I am doing a lot of modeling. For each question, we highlight words in the question that we need to include in our answer to make it "complete." I have been very impressed with the kids work!
In math, we have continued to work on addition with renaming into the hundreds place. Next week we will begin subtraction with renaming.
This week we also began our Read Naturally program. While the main focus of this program is to build oral reading fluency, we will also use the stories to build reading comprehension by answering questions about the passage read, as well as to build vocabulary. This week and next, we will be practicing the steps involved in our Read Naturally program. Eventually, students will be bringing their ipods home to work on this each night as part of homework.
Dates to Remember
Tuesday 11/9: Pizza Day!
Thursday 11/11: Veteran's Day (No School)
Friday 11/12: Faculty Professional Day (No School)
11/15-11/19: AuthorFest and Book Fair
11/24: Thanksgiving Break Begins
HAVE A WONDERFUL WEEKEND!
:)Lee
Sounds like a lot of great work going on there! I wonder if the children could be reporters in the near future and produce one of the weekly editions of this Blog using the skills they've learned! I wonder what they would say about the weeks' events?
ReplyDeleteSascha's Mom, Trina