Week in Review--Eric Carle

Poem of the Week

Reading:

-We had TWO sight words this week-- “was, by”.

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

“Skip the Word and then Come Back”

When children come to words they don’t know, some stall on the unknown word and are unable to move on. These children must learn strategies to help them move forward. This strategy teaches a reader to skip over a word until the end of the sentence or passage. Then, the reader should back up and read the sentence again, using the first letter or letters of the skipped word and their context clues to decode the unknown word.

How can you help your child with this strategy at home?

1.   When listening to your child read, help him/her realize it is okay to skip over a word and then come back to it. If, when reading, your child gets stuck on a word encourage them to skip it and come back.

2.   Model this strategy for your child. Read aloud and stop at a word they might find difficult. Think out loud and say “I am going to skip this word because I am not sure what it says. I will read the rest of the sentence and then come back to see if I can figure it out.” Hearing someone else think through the new strategy helps the student have more confidence to try the strategy on their own.

3.   Play a game of “guess my word”. Have a sentence written and have one word covered up. Have your child read the sentence and guess what the word might be. Then, uncover the letters one at a time until your child is able to decode the word!

 

Writing:

-We began our fourth unit on writing an opinion/persuasive piece! We started the week off by talking about what the word opinion means and how it can be used to write a persuasive piece giving reasons why that is your opinion and those reasons can also persuade someone to believe that same idea or even help solve a problem! We discussed a problem in our classroom and ways that we could positively solve it. We wrote about it this week during our writing mini-lessons. The problem we decided on was that when Mrs. Brown is not here, some of the class has a hard time behaving. We came up with three reasons to help the problem! We hope that if someone were to read our writing, they too would agree those reasons would help the problem and they would do their best to solve it!

Math:

-We are continuing to review previously learned skills from the year these last weeks of school. Our focus this week was on tens/ones, counting and clocks. Every student should be able to count to 100 on his/her own by the end of the year. Believe it or not report card testing will be here before we know it! During our lessons about clocks, we focused on describing the different hands, how time works, what we do at different times of the day and telling time to the “o’clock” and the “thirty”. Next week we will focus more on telling time.

Content:

• This week was all about the author and illustrator Eric Carle. We watched several videos, read books, created crafts and even completed an illustration of the caterpillar from his famous book The Very Hungry Caterpillar just like Eric Carle does himself using tissue paper! We finished the week off by going on a 5 room rotation throughout the kindergarten classrooms. Each classroom had a different focus book that then created a craft to go along with it. By the end of the morning each student had a folder filled with their very own Eric Carle crafts!
• We also continued this week with our caterpillar/butterfly observation journals. Our caterpillars have definitely grown a lot since they first arrived in our classroom. By the end of the week, one of our caterpillars was hanging upside down at the top of our jar in its “J-hang” ready to form its chrysalis and continue the process of transforming into a beautiful butterfly!