Good Things Are Happening!

This week we read our first nonfiction selection of the year.  It was a story called Dogs, and as I predicted, the kids really enjoyed it.  Our focus skill for the week was main idea and details, and I was surprised at how well we did with this!  It's usually a pretty difficult skill, especially this early in the year, but these kids are really getting it - great job!  Our high frequency words for the week were bicycle, sugar, exercise, sometimes, and special.  Robust vocabulary words were depend, responsibility, frisky, and affinity.  We learned about parts of sentences - the naming part and the telling part.  We also continued our letter writing unit.

Next week will be another first - our first week of Readers' Theater.  A Readers' Theater is like a play, only without the acting and without the memorization of lines.  The students will practice reading a part in a story all week in preparation for a performance on Friday.  The main focus of this type of reading is to increase fluency (the speed and accuracy) and practice using expression when we are reading.  We will discuss characters again as well as main idea and details.  It will be a review week for grammar skills - we'll be wrapping up sentences and reviewing the four types (statement, question, command, and exclamation) and the two parts (naming and telling).  We will continue letter writing as well.  High-frequency words will be a review from the past four weeks.  I don't anticipate any difficulties with these words, as the kids are doing a fantastic job with these!  Robust vocabulary words will be penalty, location, excitable, and positive.  Spelling words will also be a review.  The list will consist of ten words that we have already had as spelling words over the last four weeks and ten sight words.  The spelling words for next week will be:
has, win, spot, best, mud, same, broke, rule, clean, sleep, name, good, sentence, man, think, say, great, where, help, through

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

Have a nice weekend - enjoy the weather!