This week in reading our CAFE focus was on "Author's Purpose". We learned three reasons why an author writes a story. Every time an author writes, he or she writes for a reason. As readers it is important for us to understand why a piece was written because we infer the meaning of the text based on the author's purpose for writing it. Identifying why the author wrote a text deepens our understanding for how to read and comprehend the text. Although there are many different reasons for writing, we mainly focus on the following : persuade, entertain and inform.
A few examples of these are:
- Persuade-editorials, advertisements and commercials
- Entertain-short story, poetry, drama, novels, picture books
- Inform-news articles, textbooks, biographies and non-fiction
During one of my conferring sessions with two students, we used the app Popplet to compare and contrast two characters in a leveled book we were reading together. We compared a country dog vs a city dog!
During our vocabulary review lesson, we focused on the word "pattern". We practiced several different patters as a group! We really tried hard to stay together!
Morning work building words practice this week!
Writing:
We have jumped right in to our next unit, all about informational writing. We started the week off by creating a list of things we are experts in and we could write at least three facts to teach someone about. We continued on the week by using those topics to fill in an informational writing planning page. Students will use this planning page to create informational books. At some point, they will not need to use the planning page anymore!
Math:
In math we focused and learned about the number stories of numbers 6-9. We will continue working on the various ways to make each of these numbers throughout the year!
Our math vocabulary word this week was the word "number line". We wrote everything we know about numbers lines in our math journals on our iPads!
Content:
Winter is SNOW much fun! We learned all about how snowflakes form, where they come from, made snowmen and even got to play in pretend home made snow this week! We were hoping to get to play outside in real snow, but all of our snow melted by Tuesday of this week. Making it in class was just as fun though!
We watched the video below to learn all about how snow forms!
PRACTICE AT HOME:
On our next big snowfall, get out and play in the snow! Make snow angels, a snowman, build a fort, have a snowball fight....get out and enjoy the fun!
Next Week:
Important Dates/Information:
Next Week:
- In reading we will focus on PREDICT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.
- In writing we will continue our unit on informational writing pieces.
- In math we will focus on the number 100!
- Our theme next week is all about the 100th Day of School
Important Dates/Information:
- 100th day of School celebration will be during January depending on snow days
- 2/15--President's Day-NO SCHOOL (possible make-up snow day if needed)
- 2/26 K-2 Movie Matinee
