Community Patch

 Students read and discussed what a community is. We also talked about how Traverse City is a community and the different places people live, work, play and solve problems. Students were able to complete an activity by creating their own patch about Traverse City. They created designs to represent four community services: fire, police, hospital and city hall. 

Tricky Words

As readers we are working on ways to describe and solve how words and phrases have meaning in the stories we read. Students have been adding different strategies to their reading toolboxes for solving tricky words. You know when they are excited about all the tricky words they are finding and solving when we have to start a tricky word jar. This jar now contains tricky words from students (already solved by that student) to use as examples so that we as a classroom can exercise our strategies together and solve. Strategies such as: re-reading sentences, breaking apart words (chunking), using synonyms to replace and solve, etc. They are doing a WONDERFUL job! Here are some students proud of their evidence and sharing their findings with their reading partners. 

Happy Friday!

TGIF! Students had a great Friday! Here is some of what our class enjoyed! Maybe not so much of the inside recess though :)

Readers Workshop

Math Game - Double It! & Moby Max

Inside Recess FUN!

Reading Buddies with our preschool friends

Authors Share

Author sharing with a buddy! We are continuing to work on writing small moments in small bits that describe actions and emotions in sequence. Today they were able to share a variety of small moments they wrote, or are writing, and share with a partner. This also gave many students connections of their own to write down as a tiny topic for a later narrative!

Partner Reading

Partner Reading! Students buddy share from their response journals about what they are reading and their reflections. You will hear students listening and explaining, complimenting strategies, with back and forth conversations. Students also share about places in their stories with big ideas, interesting facts and character actions and emotions. 

Digging Deeper with Reading

Students are digging deeper during readers workshop! We are learning how to dig deeper with close reading. When they have lost track of what is happening in the story, or find the pieces aren't fitting together like a puzzle, they are learning to reread to reorient themselves to the book. 

First read breaks the surface

Second read gets more information and a better understanding 

Third read gives a deeper understanding of the text

Students are also focusing on the characters in their stories. Identifying what they notice by responding to major events and challenges. They are comparing and contrasting character actions and emotions to characters in their stories and characters in other stories they have read. Using the strategy of rereading texts is helping to better understand the characters students are reading about. 

Growth Spurt

Magic Pot

We read the story Two of Everything in class and learned about The Magic Pot. This Chinese Folktale is a story about a man and a woman who find a magic pot. They discover that the pot doubles whatever is put in it. When the woman drops in her hairpin, to her sruprise, two hairpins come out. When she puts in a purse containing five gold coins, she pulls out two identical purses, each containing five gold coins. The man and woman test a variety of items and we tested a variety of theories in our classroom. Ideas were very creative! 

We then did an activity creating our own story problem with the magic pot, and showed how to solve the problem. Students were doubling quantities and using standard notation (+,-,=) to represent doubling. Very fun!

Reminders

Move-A-Thon RESCHEDULED for Oct. 17th

For Friday, Oct. 3

NO POPCORN

Homework DUE

Spelling TEST

Story Problems

Students have been working on solving addition and subtraction story problems. They are visualizing, retelling, and modeling within different situations. They are also recording and connecting strategies for solving problems in different ways, choosing the best strategy that works for them. Equations are being identified using standard notation (+,-,=) to represent addition and subtraction problems. 

We have been working and learning to read and understand story problems over the last few days and students are doing an outstanding job!