Terrific Tuesday!

One thing I notice about this group of kids, and I've shared this with them, is that they are wonderfully verbal in go above and beyond when it comes to discussion and sharing their thinking. However, you would never know this by looking at their writing! For some reason, this awesomeness of understanding does not translate when they write. There might be some writing homework coming in the next week or so to help them with this important skill...stay tuned!
For Word Study, we sorted our words and found a very similar generalization as last week-short vowels but these words have more than one syllable. (We did not move on to long vowels as I had stated in my weekly notes.) In Writer's Workshop, we looked at R.J. Palacio's website (author of Wonder) to see where she got the idea for her amazing novel and found that this book started from a small moment in her life, getting ice cream with her children. Ask your child about this moment. Then, we decided that if she can start a narrative with a small moment, maybe we could too. So, we brainstormed some small moments from our lives to get our creativity flowing. Speaking of Wonder, we learned more about Summer and her perspective on Auggie. She seems like a genuine person that is truly a good friend to him. Then, we turned our focus from literary text to informational text and the features between them. Students have a Non-Fiction scavenger hunt that they are working on this week to find specific text features of informational text. We also had time for independent reading and library time. Our number talks are using more challenging numbers but you'd never know this from their level of understanding and explaining (verbally, not in writing) their thinking. Then, we continued our work on the exemplar-The I-Did-A-Read. This was really challenging for them so we discussed and completed this together. They also worked on independent math--a time where they can "play" around with math and enjoy it. In Science, we continued our inquiry balance project. We had better teamwork today but will continue working at it!