All About Bats

We have been learning all about bats! 

This is not only something fun for the holiday season, but it has also been a great connecting topic to our writing focus of informational paragraphs.

Students were assigned a video to watch that gave an array of facts related to bats. Then students were able to use their skills learned in writing to develop a structured paragraph with a beginning, middle and end. 

We also did a directed drawing of our very own bat! 

These are currently hanging in our hallway and will be coming home soon with their fantastic paragraphs!

Six Minute Fluency

Six Minute Fluency is a program we began in the classroom. It is an added supplement to our reading block where students spend six minutes increasing their reading fluency through interactive, peer-to-peer, repeated readings of high interest, leveled passages.

 

 

Students are paired with a reading buddy, where they are reading informational text passages based on social studies and science content. This helps to enhance their background knowledge and content area vocabulary. Each set of partners are given a new passage each Monday to read for the week. Partners work together to track one anothers reading errors and progress. To follow, they help each other solve errors, graph words read correctly within one minute, and visually see fluency growth on their graph throughout the week.

Ask your child to further explain their experience of Six Minute Fluency.

Apple Crunch Day

We celebrated the 6th annual Michigan Apple Crunch Day!

Journeys: Unit 2

Hello Unit 2!!

In our new unit, students are going to be pushing their thinking and using new skills and strategies to grow as readers, writers, and even speakers.

We have two new anchor texts this week.

Animals Building Homes

Whose Home Is This?

Genre: Informational Text

Some key objectives derived from this text will be identifying text and graphic features and using content to determine meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary. They will also be comparing and contrasting animals and their homes in both selections and using text features as subheadings in bold print to clarify the meaning.

Digging Deeper

One of the strategies the students are learning in our Language Arts unit is questioning. As we read text we are getting past the surface level questions and trying to dig deeper into questioning that requires us to think a little harder. While we are learning this new strategy, students are also finding out not to guess as a response, and instead go back into the text to research the appropriate answer. They are doing awesome!

Together we came up with an anchor chart of words that could start off really great questions. So then we got into the holiday season and used Stellaluna to practice. As one of their center work tasks, students were able to listen to the story. Then they had to individually, or as a group, develop deeper questions from the book. You can see the growth in their questioning!

Looking forward to doing this again.