In Social Studies, students are beginning with a unit on Culture. Your child should have brought home a planning page this week. Students are gathering information, pictures, and ideas for their own Coat of Arms. They will need to design a symbol that represents their family as well as draw a picture or a flag to represent where their family comes from. They have worked together with Mrs. Prosser to create criteria for this project. She will be providing them with a rubric next week for the final result. Please remember to send their duotang back to school by Tuesday, October 9.
Our staff had a fabulous professional development day on writing. I used two of the ideas from that workshop to teach students this week. We learned about where good writers get their ideas from and we practiced one new writing technique to help us become better writers. First, we talked about the brain. I explained to students that all writing begins in the brain as thinking. We either push the ideas out with our mouths (by telling the stories) or with our pencils (by writing the stories). In our classroom, we will do a lot of talk about writing this year through whole class discussions, small group brainstorming, or partner talk (to get ideas flowing). Students also created a Brain Pocket reference. This is basically a place where they can list ideas for writing that go in one of three categories: the memory pocket, the fact pocket, or the imagination pocket. Then students chose one idea from their memory pockets to use for our writing lesson on details. They needed to provide a fact followed by a sentence with a detail about the fact. Our goal was to create a piece of writing with five facts and five details that was interesting to read (not robot-like).
In Reading, we began to talk about one of the strategies that good readers use when reading - Connecting. I explained to the students that when readers are reading, they are also thinking. They notice when something they read "reminds them" of something from their lives, from another text, or from the world (TEXT-TO-SELF, TEXT-TO-TEXT, AND TEXT-TO-WORLD). We have been using a fabulous resource that provides articles (taken from current events in the news) in a nonfiction format written for our grade level. This week we read an article about Annaliese Carr, the youngest swimmer to cross Lake Ontario. She reminded us a lot of Terry Fox and Laurie Skreslet, the first Canadian to summit Everest.
You may have noticed a list of words in our planners for spelling. We do not have spelling tests on these words. However, I would love for students to practice these words. They can practice them on Spelling City too (look on the links page). These words are the first of our Nifty Thrifty Fifty (words containing either a prefix or a suffix). We are learning how these change the meaning of the root words and we are also using these prefixes and suffixes to read and write other words. This leads to the first spelling strategy that I have taught students to use: Using Words I Know. Good spellers do not spell words one letter at a time. Rather, they use chunks of letters or patterns from other words they know. This week we used chunks from Coke, Sprite, Grape, and Root Beer to help us spell words like miter, capers, and spoken.
In the next couple of weeks:
- return QSP magazine forms to school
- Goal-setting conference requests will be coming home
- Early dismissals at 2pm on October 16/17 for conferences
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