Reading : We continued working on various reading decoding strategies during reading. In addition to Spoon the Raccoon Detective, the students also learned about Hugo the Huge Mouth Hippo, Slither the Sound It Out Snake, and Chunk the Skunk. All of these animals relate to strategies that adults mindlessly use when they get stuck on tricky words. The animals are a way to get the students to remember, and use, these strategies so that they eventually become effortless to use. Hugo the Huge Mouth Hippo gets his mouth ready to read unknown words. He reads all of the sentence before the tricky word and then says the first sound/sounds of the tricky word. Sometimes the word just pops out! Slither the Sound it Out Snake sounds out words one letter at a time and then tries to blend all of the sounds together. Sometimes Slither makes some pretty strange sounding words, though. That's where Chunk the Skunk comes in. Chunk reminds readers to look for 'chunks' of the tricky word that they know. (For example, in the word fantastic, you might see 'an' and 'as'.)
We have a few more strategies to learn this week before we move on to talking about 'just right' books.
Writing : The students have been working on 'small moment' stories for the past couple of weeks. If you didn't read my post a couple of weeks ago, small moment stories are stories that focus on a small moment in time. For example, rather than writing about an entire trip to Disney World all in one story, a student may write a story just about meeting his/her favorite character. The point of this writing unit is to teach the students how to include description in their stories so that even small moment stories are interesting.
Last week, we spent time learning about a few ways to add details to small moment stories - by adding names, the setting, and using color words.
Math : After wrapping up unit 2, we moved on to unit 3, which is an even more in-depth look at number stories. So far, we have discussed various methods that students can use to solve number stories, learned about part-part-total number stories, and done a few more math investigations. For the investigations, the students explored ordering objects by length, counting large quantities of pennies, and doubles facts (2+2, 3+3, 4+4, etc).
Science : We wrapped up our unit on insects and arachnids before moving on to our next science unit, which is all about weather. So far we've gone over the different types of weather that we have in each season.
Social Studies : A couple of weeks ago, we learned all about what Veterans Day is and why we celebrate. Last week we learned about the differences between 'wants' and 'needs.' This week, we'll start talking about the history of Thanksgiving.
Here are some pictures of 1-Bu last week :