A Week of Review

This week was our first review week, and it was also the first week we got to read a Readers' Theater.  A Readers' Theater is like a play, only without the acting and without the memorization of lines.  Students rehearse reading a script throughout the week and perform on Friday, with the main goal being fluent reading with expression.  Our Readers' Theater this week was called Neighborhood News.  We reviewed characters and main idea/details.  Our high-frequency words were all review this week, but we did have four new vocabulary words (penalty, location, excitable, and positive).  We reviewed sentences and continued writing friendly letters.

Next week will be the last week of first quarter.  We will read Winners Never Quit.  Our focus skill will be making predictions, and our strategy will be to use prior knowledge to help us make predictions.  High frequency words will be brother, caught, cheer, learn, lose, and straight.  Our robust vocabulary words will be agile, spectator, competitive, and worthwhile.  In grammar we will begin talking about nouns.  We already have a little bit of knowledge about nouns, and the students should know a noun chant.  Ask your second grader if they remember it, and if they do, have them do it for you.  And speaking of chants, have your second grader do the main idea chant for you as well!  We will wrap up our letter writing unit next week.

Spelling will be changing slightly beginning next week.  Due to inconsistencies between grade levels as far as how many words the students are required to learn how to spell, we are cutting our list down to 15 words.  The list will consist of ten words with the weekly pattern and five sight words.  Next week's pattern is long i words spelled with ie and igh spelling patterns.  Words are:
pie, high, tie, light, lie, night, bright, fight, might, tight, much, before, line, right, too
* Please note that the original list has "right" on it twice.  Please change one of those to "fight."

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

* I could use one more parent volunteer if you have the time to donate.  I'm willing to work with your schedule.  I am open any morning or afternoon except Monday and Wednesday mornings, as I already have two wonderful mommies volunteering on those days!

I hope your weekend is fun-filled and relaxing!