Week in Review--Dr. Seuss (week 2)

To celebrate Dr. Seuss's birthday and Read Across America Day, we spent 45 minutes of our afternoon reading with some of the 5th graders in the library. We wore our pajamas, brought blankets and pillows and curled up with some good books. We read by ourselves for part of the time, with a 5th grade buddy and finished up with our librarian reading a Dr. Seuss book aloud to us!

Reading:

-We had TWO sight words this week-- “put, here”.

-The CAFÉ strategy we worked on this week was the strategy.

“Retell a Story”

Retelling the story is a comprehension strategy used to help readers recall what is happening in the story. It involves telling what is important in the story without telling too much. The most effective way to teach retelling is through modeling and practice. Model this strategy for your students and then allow them to practice. There are many ways to enhance learning for the strategy of retelling, here are a few:

1. Introduce the Retell Rope described on the ready reference guide in the back of the CAFE book. This strategy provides a visual and kinesthetic reminder for children to help them focus on the strategy being learned.

2. After a brief reminder on what it means to be a good listener, allow students to practice this strategy by sharing a retelling of a story with a partner. Partners should listen to the retelling carefully, prompting with questions about the characters, setting, problem, events, or solution if needed.

3. Make this strategy fun by allowing children to use small props or puppets when retelling their story.

4. Fold a piece of paper into thirds. Have the children use these columns to write beginning, middle, and end. Then, have the children draw a picture that retells what happened in the beginning of the story, in the middle of the story, and at the end of the story. The space is small so children must weed out the minor details of the story and only draw the most important details for their retelling. Then, using the pictures, have the children explain what they drew as they retell the story.

We also practiced syllables with a partner this week!

 

Writing:

-We began AND finished our class book that will be sent off to be published! We based our book off of the Dr. Seuss story Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? We changed the title to be Mrs. Brown Can Moo, Can You? and each student wrote a sentence using their name and writing a noise they can make. We went through the entire writing and illustrating process by having a first draft, second draft and sometimes a third draft of writing and then continued with that same format with the illustrations by having a first draft and then finished both on the FINAL draft! The class is very excited about becoming published authors. I sent home the order form on Monday. If you would like to order a book, please send that form filled out in the attached envelope ASAP. If you do not want to order a book, please still send it back and check the “NO” box.

Math:

-We focused on reviewing several skills learned throughout the past nine weeks, as well as some in the first semester. We reviewed subtraction, decomposing numbers 1-9 in more than one way, decomposing numbers 11-19 into tens/ones, counting by ones, counting by tens, 3D shapes and recognizing numbers! There are still a few students who are struggling with counting and number recognition. Each student should be able to count to 75 by now and 100 by the end of the year. Keep practicing at home. We count in our classroom every day!

-I sent home the March math homework on Monday. The last chapter is about “addition stories”. We have not introduced that topic yet. It is something we will begin learning next week!

 

Content:

 

We finished our second week of learning about Dr. Seuss! What a fun two weeks we had reading his books, watching his movies, completing crafts, writing our own PUBLISHED book based off of one of his books and much more! This week we read Ten Apples Up on Top and completed a writing page about how many apples we think we could hold up on top! We also read the story Horton Hears a Who. We really enjoyed this book! We talked about why the line that Horton says “A person’s a person no matter how small.” Was important for all of us to understand and believe. We practiced using kind words and giving compliments to our friends after creating our own Horton puppets! Thank you to David and Owen’s families for donating the grey socks that became Horton’s nose!  The puppets were very fun to make, but also taught us all very good lessons about being kind friends to one another.