Reading
Reading should be fostered in and out of the classroom to ensure that students build their fluency as well as their comprehension skills. Below are some resources that you can use to practice these strategies at home!
This resource is a set of questions that you can ask your child before and after they read to you to gauge their comprehension of what they are reading.
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This is a chart that you can use to track your child's reading. Keep it somewhere visible and hold them accountable for reading each night.
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The Bad Seed
As a school, we started the year with a book titled "The Bad Seed" by Jory John. The video below is a read-aloud of the book. Discussions around the book brought up themes of growth mindset and resiliency. Students then recreated their own versions of the book as a part of sentence writing.
Sentence Writing
Students began work on sentence writing and proper sentence structure. We discussed the importance of including a subject and a predicate, as well as paying attention to conventions such as capital letters and punctuation.
In this activity, students were asked to match subjects with predicates in order to make sentences that made sense.
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In this activity, students were tasked with identifying the missing parts of the sentence, and to rewrite the fragments into complete sentences.
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After some practice work around writing proper sentences, students applied their knowledge to write scripts for compassion videos. This project tied directly into the work we were doing in mindfulness around showing empathy and recognizing emotions in others. We watched two videos comparing a friend showing compassion to help his friend versus not showing compassion.
The students used the models to identify the following ideas about compassion:
The students used the models to identify the following ideas about compassion:
When students finished writing their scripts, students filmed their own compassion videos using the Clips app on the iPads.
Paragraph Writing
As a natural transition from sentence writing, students are beginning paragraph writing. This will help students with writing in all subjects and leads us into structured writing such as formal letters.
As an introduction to paragraphs, students were introduced to the hamburger paragraph. This is a simple structure that students can use to structure their writing in order to ensure that they include a topic sentence, details, and a concluding sentence. This will help set the foundations to increase the quality of their writing in "stoplight writing".
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Verb Tenses
When writing, it's important to pay attention to our verb tenses! Because it can be pretty tricky, these anchor charts are posted in the classroom as a reminder.