Happy Spring, Families!! This last week of spring break has been an excellent space and time to recharge and get ready for some new learning!
For the past couple of weeks, my word work group has been working on spelling words. We have gone through different spelling rules and sounds for making blends and learning tips and tricks for remembering spelling differences for homophones. One example would be desert has one s for sand, and dessert has two s's for sweet stuff.
Each week we have been doing different activities with our spelling lists, in order to get alot of practice in for each word. We have been putting them in alphabetical order, and grouping words where they fit best , or are opposites. The class also seems to enjoy when I write a paragraph for them to correct, finding spelling mistakes and sometimes punctuation and capital mistakes as well. We also play eraser man to build spelling skills.
During math the class has been diligently working on strengthening mental math strategies for addition and subtraction. We have been working with numbers up to one thousand. The class as a whole has gotten very good at making one hundred, and using their quick recall of facts through 20 to really excel in this unit. We learned a strategy that turns a 98 into a quick hundred, to make an easier problem for mental subtraction, instead of borrowing across. This strategy will serve us well when we get to our money unit.
Of course, we continue to keep sharp on our 2 and 3 times tables. When we are back from break, we will begin learning the four table as well.
Readers workshop has focused on text features of non fiction writing. We have been noticing headings in the text, and diagrams. We have been determining what the book, or certain part of the book, is trying to teach us. We also made predictions and shared with the group when we learned any new facts about a subject that we were reading about, that we thought we knew well already.
In our writers workshop, we published!! The last week before break, every student was working very hard to meet the deadline for our publishing party on Thursday. Everyone put great effort into making their fiction stories as well written, neat, and as well illustrated as possible. The work payed off! All of the writers have made leaps and bounds in the quality and quantity of their work. A job well done!