Reading Skill Review

We practiced in small groups using task cards and answer keys to practice main idea, summarizing, context clues, and text structure.

Update 9-7

Our Getting to Know You Days were a success!  The students seemed to have a great time and were sorted into "houses" based on Harry Potter.    They traveled to different teachers completing activities along with assessments.

This Friday in L.A., we have our first weekly ten.  A weekly ten is basically a reading quiz that has one article with questions equally ten points.  It is a review of the skills we have been learning in class.  These skills are:  main idea and supporting details, summarizing, inferring, context clues, and text structure.  We completed a practice weekly ten today which we will grade and discuss tomorrow (it doesn't count).

Reading logs are due each Friday. I do expect students to write complete, detailed sentences and to write neatly.  These are some examples of high-quality work as an example.

In writing, we are still working on writing expert pieces and topics we know a lot about.  We also have worked on creating subheadings that will fit under a topic.  We will continue to practice organizing our writing as the year continues.  See an example below.

Today, I met with all students that were here about Reading Counts.  Each child now has directions in their planner along with a hand-written goal for the first quarter.  Goals are flexible if need be.  All points for 1st quarter are earned until October 13.  

Who Am I Projects

Update 8-29

We are busy, busy in Language Arts!  The skills we are working on include main idea, supporting details, summarizing, making inferences, and supporting them with evidence from the text.  In class, we have two notebooks- one is for reading and the other for writing.  They both stay at school in my classroom and kids have their own drawers to keep them in.

Today we practiced main idea, details, and inferencing skills using whiteboards.  We worked a lot on how it is okay to sometimes write in your own words or to copy it directly from the article making sure to use quotation marks. (see the sample below)

With vocabulary, today each class chose three words that have been important to Language Arts so far and we made webs for these.  Then, we talked about the root graph and how it means "write".  See how we illustrated that in our notebooks below.

In writing, we are working on organizing ideas into paragraphs and writing topic sentences this week.  We started a class mini-writing project on a vertebrate.  Mrs. Skeels' class chose amphibians while Mrs. Will and Dr. Stoyle's classses chose fish.  We had to brainstorm subheadings or big ideas that we could research about.  Then, kids took notes in groups on the subheading their group had.  (see below).  We will use that to anchor us together to practice writing a paragraph with a topic sentence.  That will transfer over to the kids' own informational writing projects.  As of now, kids have made an expert list in the back of their notebooks and written 1 or 2 entries about these topics.

First Day Summer Reading Projects with Mrs. Skeels' Class

First Day Summer Reading Projects with Mrs. Will's Class

First Day Summer Reading Projects with Dr. Stoyle's Class