Before we get into it, I just wanted to say thank you to all of you for making our feast a success and for your kind and generous holiday gifts. I so appreciate you and all of your support! Thank You!
Here's what we'll be up to this week:
Reading Workshop: Over the next couple weeks, the focus of our reading workshop will be comprehension strategies. This week, we will be focusing on are asking questions.
Questions are at the heart of teaching and learning. Posing questions allows us to seek out information, solve problems, and extend our understanding. They propel us to read on and to do further research. I want to teach our students that instead of demanding answers all the time, they need to ask thoughtful and insightful questions. In order to develop critical, analytical readers, we must teach them to think about and question what they read. Asking questions enriches the reading experience and leads to deeper understanding.
We will begin the week learning to ask questions as we read. Students will ask questions as they read and understand that good readers question the text, stop and notice when their questions are answered, and recognize that not all of our questions are answered.
As the week continues, we will learn how to ask questions to gain information and how to ask questions to expand our thinking.
Writing Workshop: This unit in writing is all about the Six Traits of Writing. Six Traits of Writing is a systematic and analytical approach for learning about writing one part at a time. By focusing on only one trait at a time, a writer can break down a complex activity like writing and make it more manageable. With practice, writers can then learn to be more critical of their own work and can make improvements in the quality of their writing.
The Six Traits of Writing are: Ideas, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, and Conventions.
This week students will be introduced to all six traits. Students will work in groups of threes and learn about one specific trait. Students will become "experts" on their trait and create a poster and a presentation for their other classmates on their particular trait. We will round out the week focusing on Ideas.
Throughout this unit, we will look at mentor texts that highlight one or two of the traits. We will discuss the traits, read the texts, and discuss what they thought the author did really well. Then students write pieces inspired by these wonderful texts.
Math: We will begin the week with some review of subtraction methods. Students will reacquaint themselves with both the count-up method, which is totally different than how you and I learned math, but it is a lot of fun. Yes, I just said that a subtraction algorithm is fun! They will also practice the traditional method of subtraction as well. As the week goes on, we will be plugging away on our multiplication and division unit and rolling our numbers.
Theme: We will spend some time wrapping up our unit on France. Students will reflect on what they learned, what went well, and what could've been better. Our next theme will be revealed shortly, but I will tell you that it is a science theme!
Well, that's a lot of information for now. Just a few things to remember:
-Ski program starts Thursday January 16th for 3rd grade. We will be skiing for the second half of the day every Thursday for 5 weeks! Yahoo!!! If you haven't paid yet, please pay as soon as possible. If you have not paid by the second week of the program, you child will not be allowed to ski until you do.
- No school for elementary students (not sure about secondary, sorry) on Friday January 17 and Monday January 20. Enjoy that 4-day weekend!
Thanks again for reading. Please let me know if this blog is helpful to you or if there is anything you would like me to add or omit. Your feedback really would mean a lot to me.
Thank you!
No comments:
Post a Comment