Cultural Arts Tuesday

This afternoon we will be enjoying a cultural arts presentation on The Rain Forrest sponsored by the PTA. The children and I are so excited!

In reading we switched our genres from informational text to folktales and fairy tales. We began by brainstorming characteristics such as; exaggeration, greed, magic, good (poor) vs. evil (rich). Then we read a Ute folk tale called Coyote Steals the Blanket.

After that, we reviewed the verb tenses and identified some generalizations for regular action verbs. Past tense verbs ends in -ed, present end in -s and future tense verbs have a helping verb with it.

While I meet with reading groups the students will work on individual reading group assignments. Then they will complete a verb worksheet and practice writing their spelling words in cursive.

Crabs: We got a new book called The Old Woman who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle. We began reading this book and worked on two skills; inferencing and retelling. The students will not be bringing this book home tonight as we do not have enough copies. Their homework tonight is to work on their reading log.

In math we continued our lesson from yesterday by using skip counting to construct rectangles with given areas. Today, I deviated a bit from the plan to connect area and repeated addition (skip counting) to multiplication. I made sure the students knew we weren't going to be test on multiplication during this unit but I have been wanting to make this connection for the past week or so...so I did!! While I met with small groups to work on estimating area and identifying area and perimeter, the students worked independently on a constructing rectangles worksheet. There is a constructing rectangles worksheet for homework.

Following PE, lunch and indoor recess I called small groups of students to work on revising their writing pieces from last week. I did not get a chance to call any more reading groups since we had our Rain Forest Presentation at 2:15. However, this is what the rest of the groups did...

Bears: Reread the entire book of Leaving Home and marked places with post it notes where they found a problem (P) that the immigrants faced or a solution (S).

Lions: Wrote a summary of The Changing Earth in their RRJ.