One Hundred-Thirteenth Day

Seven students have had the opportunity to use the computer for word processing and have completed their long-term projects. One student is creating an electronic presentation to accompany her hard copy. Today we read an African folk tale about Anansi the spider. We used the comprehension strategy of clarification to clear up ambiguities and new ideas from the story. We reviewed common nouns and commas with items in a series.

We started a new topic (17) in math today about money. We worked with pennies and nickels today.

For Visual Art we practiced and discussed line as an element of art.

One Hundred-Fourth Day

Today we worked again with inflections. We continued with our reading of Matthew and Tilly using 'clarification' and 'making connections' as comprehension strategies. We then applied the comprehension skill of stating 'main ideas and details'. We learned that sometimes friends don't always get along and sometimes need to spend some time apart in order to better appreciate the friendship. We took dictation today with long /oo/ and long-u spellings with two syllable words.

In math we worked again with fact families. With 3 points of the score being bonus points from the performance assessment, a score of 17 was passing on Topic 15 test. Of the 23 students taking the test, 16 students passed with a score of 17 or better. One student scored 27 and 3 students scored 24, 3 a 23, and 4 a 22. On the social studies exam, again 16 students passed with a 3 or a 4.

One Hundred-Third Day

Today we blended and reviewed compound words. We used the comprehension strategies of "making connections" and "clarifying" for beginning our first reading of the friendship story Matthew and Tilly. We wrote about a time when we argued with a friend of ours and told how the problem was solved.

Topic 15 Test was handed back today. Results will be posted along with the social studies test tomorrow. Today we began Topic 16 which revisits the related facts ideas.

Ninety-Ninth Day

FWe are ready for our Birthday Celebration! Tomorrow's our big day.

Today we began The Big Team Relay Race. We will work on making predictions and summarizing as a comprehension strategies. Tomorrow we will work on comprehension skills. For this story we will focus on the idea of teamwork. We discussed the meaning of the word relay. A review of the /ow/ spellings for blending led to a discussion of the meaning of the words: fowl, stout, and louse. We created a Brace Map for the the noun 'bath'. We then made our first Flow Map and sequenced taking a bath. These prewriting steps will assist students in formulating ideas for explaining a process/activity to another person.

In math we used related addition facts to help with subtraction.

Hope to see you at Literacy Night tonight.