Tuesday

This morning, in math, the students worked on a line plot activity while I met with students who needed practice solving subtraction with regrouping problems. For homework there is a numeric pattern worksheet...I know that yesterday I said the homework would be a line plot worksheet but there was a glitch with my plans! Tomorrow we will begin working on a review packet for the unit 1 assessment. We will take the assessment, in class, on Friday.

Today's whole group reading lesson centered around determining important information (versus interesting facts) in our reading. The purpose for our reading is what decides what information is important. For example, today we read a book about whales. Our purpose was to find out how whales breathe and what whales eat. So, the fact that whales breathe through blowholes on the top of their bodies was important information. When we read that whales used to roam the earth and have arms and legs, that was listed as an interesting fact because it did not address our purpose for reading.

After that we reviewed the use of apostrophes, especially in contractions. Yesterday's independent work demonstrated that the entire class is struggling with contractions. We began reviewing this in our reading groups today.

While I met with reading groups the students completed their writing pieces, worked on identifying unknown words and contractions in their new reading books, completed a WOW worksheet for the word utter (to speak) and practiced writing the lower case letters, x, y and z in cursive.

Reading Groups:
Blue: Reviewed words that include ce and ci...and the rule that when c is followed by an e or i it makes the s sound. Reviewed contractions. Homework tonight: the students need to read their new book and find 4 new contractions to add to their RRJ...there is a model in the RRJ of what to do. Ex. didn't = did + not

Red: Set a purpose for reading the Wednesday Surprise and that is to find out what is the surprise. Reviewed contractions. Homework: students need to read the book and find 5 contractions to add to their RRJ. There is an example in their RRJ and see the model above.

Green: Reviewed contractions. For homework the children need to read their book and add 4 contractions to their RRJ. There is a model in their RRJ and you can find one above.

Following lunch and outdoor recess we will review the results of our chromatography experiment from yesterday. We tried to separate the pigments of different colors of ink and it worked!!! One student brought me their results which had separated to yellow and blue and I asked if their marker was green and they said YES!!! It was such fun to see that our predictions were right!!

After that we will go to a cultural arts assembly called The Strong Man.