Last week during Word Work, my learning group focused on recognizing a complete sentence as having nouns and a verb. We identified these sentence parts as subject and predicate. The subject is the naming part of the sentence, and the predicate is the action part. This class is already quite good at identifying parts of speech and recognizing a complete sentence!
During Math last week, we finished up our measurements unit with abbreviation review and measurement comparisons. We continued to work with weight, using estimation and real scales for pounds, ounces, grams and kilograms. We solved a lot of story problems involving weight units.
During our Readers Workshop, the class had a wonderful couple of days learning about authors' intentions. We used a group read aloud as a mentor text. We identified places in the story where the author made us gasp, or laugh, or otherwise show a strong feeling. Next, we asked "why" the story worked in that way. Was it the picture? Was it the strong words that the author used? "How" did the author do it? The class then worked in pairs with their own books, marking places with post-it notes where they got a strong feeling. As a whole class, we made a chart to identify the what, why, and how the author showed craft. Then we copied the mentors! By learning from the best, we can improve our own writing!
That leads me to our Writers Workshop! For the past couple of weeks the class has been developing characters and settings for our fictional writing unit. We made some fabulous pages listing some very powerful describing words to get ready to write. After studying authors intention and thinking about what we want our readers to feel, we were ready to get started! The students used the outline tool to organize how each page would flow into the next, and show a strong beginning , middle, and end to their stories. I am very excited to see how their creative minds will use the new craft moves we studied!