Quick and Crazy

This week was a whirlwind!  On top of it being a short week, I was out on Tuesday for some individual testing and evaluations of the tests the kids took last week.  Our sub on Tuesday, Mrs. Hart, did a wonderful job!

This week we read a story called Arthur's Reading Race.  We talked a lot about characters - what characters are, how to pick out the main characters, and who the characters were in this particular story.  We completed a character map using Arthur and D.W. and talked about how these two characters are similar and different.

One thing the kids will be working on weekly is the recognition of certain high-frequency words from the story.  The words for this week were already, prove, police, eight, and sign.  Your child should now be able to recognize these words when reading other texts as well.  Also introduced this week were robust vocabulary words.  I explained these words to the kids as "grown-up" words.  These are words that pertain to our weekly story, but may be words the kids haven't heard before or don't quite  know what they mean yet.  Each week we will have four new robust vocabulary words - our challenge is to try to use these words as much as we can throughout the week so that, by Friday, we all know and understand what they mean.  Our robust vocabulary words for this week were challenge, underestimate, proficient, and heed.  See if your second grader can use any of these words in a sentence for you - I'll bet you're impressed!

Our grammar skill for the week was sentences.  We talked about examples of sentences vs. non-sentences.  We discussed the importance of word order in sentences.  We stressed that a complete sentence begins with a capital letter and ends with some type of punctuation (more on this next week).  We practiced writing sentences about pictures and focused on staying on topic when writing these sentences.

Next week will be lesson two in our Storytown textbook.  We will read Frog and Toad All Year.  We will continue our study of characters.  We will have five new high-frequency words to recognize (covered, everything, guess, through, woods) and four new robust vocabulary words to learn (anonymous, unselfish, satisfied, neighborly).  Our grammar skill will be statements and questions.  We will also begin talking about writing friendly letters.  Spelling words will have a short e, o, or u spelling pattern.  Next week's words are:
not, bed, run, job, bed, spot, get, mud, ten, duck, helmet, puppet, rotten, subject, contest, little, work, know, place, years

Our specials schedule for next week is:
Monday - library
Tuesday - music
Wednesday - computer
Thursday - art
Friday - music

Have a great weekend!