Week of Oct. 2nd

 Our writing has focused on creating a personal narrative for the past two weeks. We discovered a personal narrative is simply a true story about you. This can be tricky for students, so supporting them to break this task down with several mini-lessons was extremely beneficial. Our first mini-lesson was designed to help them understand what a personal narrative is and how to brainstorm a topic that they felt was worth writing about. When we brainstorm, we think about everything we can write about and find the best possible topic. When you brainstorm personal narrative topics, you can think about memories you have about things that have happened to you, fun things you have done with your family or friends, trips you have taken or special places you have visited, activities you have done at school or anything else that has happened to you in your life. We discussed that it is important to choose a topic you care about and remember many details about. We created a brainstorming sheet that shows six things they feel would make a good topic through the use of simple sketches and a few words to remember their ideas. Upon completing our brainstorming, we learned how to use proper strategies, such as describing the setting using an onomatopoeia ( a word that is a sound such as click, bang, thump) or dialogue, to introduce our story and capture the reader's attention. Our stories used proper transition words such as First, Then, Next and Last to help our story flow. We then learned how to create a proper ending to complete our narrative. Our endings could inform the reader of a lesson we learned, how we felt about the situation, an update or a hope for the future. Writing a personal narrative will be an important skill this year, and the students will have many more opportunities to practice. 

This week, we also introduced the Fab 4 Reciprocal Reading Strategies.  Reciprocal teaching is a supported discussion technique that incorporates four main strategies that good readers use together to comprehend the text they are predicting, questioning, clarifying and summarizing. This week's focus was a lesson that helped us implement predicting skills before reading a story. As a class, we discovered that so many clues about a story can be gathered just by looking closely for clues on the cover and paying close attention to the title of a book. The title can also provide clues as to what the main problem in a story might be. We chose the book "Those Shoes" by Maribeth Boelts and came up with our own predictions about what would happen in the story. Then, we created a storyboard showing what we felt our prediction was with regard to the story's problem.  Once our own individual predictions were made, each child was given questions to answer and reflect upon. After our discussion, we listened to the story and evaluated how close our predictions were to the actual story. 

Our word work this week focused on long and short “a.” We also reviewed the use of “magic e” when wanting to change a short vowel into a long vowel, such as mad to made or plan to plane. Once we have reviewed all of the long and short vowel sounds, we will revisit other possibilities that can occur to make a long “a” sound, such as ay,ai.

Our words this week to continue to practice spelling:

words, not, all, or, use, there, their, many, how, if