ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS:
Permission slips for the Step Up Day and the Animal Wildlife Park need to be returned! Please remember to send in $3.50 for the admittance fee to the Wildlife Park.
Field Day will be next Tuesday, May 22!
Remember to return the yellow sheet with Step Up Day information for Dunn School. The bottom of the sheet indicates whether your child will be bringing a lunch from home or if they need a bagged lunch from Russell. This needs to be returned by Friday!
We need shoe boxes! As a part of our Animal Projects, we will be creating dioramas in the classroom. Please send in a shoebox for your child. Also, if you are willing and able to donate any modeling clay for us to use to make the animals, it would be a huge help! A letter will be going home soon about this as an extra reminder.
BIG thank you to those of you who were able to donate supplies to our classroom! It was greatly appreciated!
Classroom wishlist: TISSUES! We are running low!
This week in..
Language Arts: This week, Team Blowey is trying a new and improved CAFE work time. We will be exploring and practicing a lot of new options to help us build our reading and writing skills! Here is a glimpse at how our CAFE time has changed:
First, we have two rounds of CAFE goal time. Each round is separated into two groups of students. In both rounds, there will be one group of students working on either writing or word work. There will also be a group of students working on CAFE (comprehension, accuracy, fluency, and expanding vocabulary). At the end of round one, we meet on the rug for a mini lesson. Then, we have round two. Students who were working on either writing or word work in round one will now switch to CAFE and vice versa.
When students are working on writing, they get three different choices in how they will practice. First, students may work in their writing journals. They can write about a topic they choose or if they have trouble deciding what to write, they can pick an idea from our idea box. Second, student may choose to work on our current writing project. At the moment, that is our Animal Research Project. Third, students may choose to work out of the writing flip book. The flip book provides writing prompts that are coordinated with the stories we read each week to help us build our comprehension skills.
When students work on word work, they are working off of their spelling menus. Before students take a spelling test, they must prove to their partner that they have completed a spelling workbook page and also practiced one other menu option.
There are four parts to the CAFE part of our work time: comprehension, accuracy, fluency, and expanding vocabulary. Each part has different options for students to choose from.
When students are practicing comprehension, they can choose from lots of different choices. First, students may choose to read to themselves. They can do this by choosing a book from their book box or by using a website from the portaportal. Near the end of the goal time, they need to fill out an accountability sheet telling me what story they read and what their favorite part was. Second, students may choose to work through the reading flip book. Just like the writing flip book, students have a chance to practice their reading skills through activities that are specifically designed with our whole group comprehension story. Third, students may choose to practice comprehension by completing a book project. Once they have completed a book, they can show that they understood the book by completing one of a variety of projects. A few examples would be a story map, a story chart, a web, or the likes and dislikes of the book.
When students are practicing accuracy, they can choose from two different choices. They can either practice their sight words or they may choose to play the game speedy phrases. The goal of speedy phrases is to say as many short phrase cards as you can in one minute, and then try to get even more phrases the next minute. They will time themselves for five minutes total.
When students are practicing fluency, they can choose from even more options. First, students may practice fluency by working with a partner and doing "I read, you read". When they are done, they have an accountability sheet to fill out telling me who their partner was and what expressions they used when they were reading. Second, students can work on fluency by listening to reading. They may listen to stories by using several of the websites on the portaportal. Third, students may practice fluency by playing Express It! Express It! is a game where students work with a partner to read a variety of phrases with correct expression. First, they read the phrase. Then, they read the phrase again with more expression. Then, their partner reads the phrase. If they read it differently, they figure out why.
When students are practicing expanding vocabulary they can choose from one of three choices. First, they can go on a vocabulary adventure! Each week, their will be picture cards with a story on the back that feature 6 vocabulary words. In their notebooks, students need to write the words, define them, and use them in a sentence. Once they have completed that, they may read the story together. Second, students can practice expanding their vocabulary by using a vocab catcher. When they are reading to themselves, they will tune into interesting words and note them on their vocab catcher. When they have finished recording them, they will look up the word in the dictionary and practice using the word in a sentence. Third, students can practice expanding their vocabulary by exploring the word work flip book. The flip book has specific activities designed the words we study each week as a whole group.
Throughout this process, I am keeping track of student's choices. This allows me to help students broaden their horizons and make sure that they are exploring different ways of practicing. It allows helps to make sure students are working on all components of reading and not necessarily just their favorite part of reading.
As a part of this introduction, whole groups lessons this week will revolve around two things. First, we will be working together to take our research and put it into a rough draft. Second, our lessons will be revolving around teaching, modeling, and practicing our new system for our language arts goal time. This will help us to some time to review comprehension strategies, phonics patterns, and vocabulary words from earlier in the year.
Math: We are coming to the end of our odd and even unit. We will have a few more lessons figuring out what numbers (from 0-20) are odd and what numbers are even. We will also practice writing a doubles or near doubles number sentence for each number. In addition, students will be using their critical thinking skills to explain why a doubles number sentence is written for even numbers and why a near doubles number sentence is written for odd numbers. In order to do this, we have been talking about partners and teams. If a number is even, everyone will have a partner and the number can be split into two equal teams. If a number is odd, someone will be left out and the two teams will not be equal.
Later this week, we will unpack our final unit: measurement. In this unit, students will learn to measure objects accurately using appropriate tools, measure the same object using different units, find out how much longer one object is than another, estimate lengths, measure several objects and show the data on a line plot, and also solve word problems involving length. The complete checklists will be posted next week. If your child has moved on to measurement, they can practice any of the measurement standards on IXL. They are all letter "S."
Other news: This past Monday was the last time we got to see our book buddies. We had a lot of fun creating creatures to help us remember each other! It was awesome to have some older role models for us to look up to. Working together helped us learn what Team Blowey will need to look like next year as third graders at Dunn School!
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