Happy Wednesday Everyone!
We have been hard at work here in Core 2! In Reading we have been building our Word Sort routine, including writing 5 silly sentences with our word sort words. If you are still wondering if Word Sorts would be a good fit for your homeschooling- please reach out and we can chat. We have also been building our routine around reading our leveled readers. Students are in a group made up of students who are at the same reading level. I give them an appropriate Reading A-Z book and they read it together. Throughout the year I will introduce different strategies that I want them to try out while reading, or reading comprehension work that I would like for them to do. This week it was retelling the story (Beginning, Middle, and End). The idea of figuring out what is important about the beginning, middle, and end of a story is a topic that we are covering in depth during Writer's Workshop, so it is great to see their understanding of what they are reading build as well. I have been chipping away at doing each student’s individual reading assessment (DRA). Please reach out if you are needing to know their updated DRA score and I will get that to you as soon as possible. I wanted to mention that it is vital that your child is reading out loud to an adult for at least 20 minutes a day at home. At this age, they need the daily practice in order to progress. In Math we have been continuing our daily number talks and word problems. I loved hearing that some of you tried writing word problems at home this week! If you are interested in the book that I used to learn how to write meaningful word problems, it is called Children’s Mathematics. It is not a curriculum, but rather a really wonderful tool to help you learn how to write word problems and have your student solve them: https://www.amazon.com/Childrens-Mathematics-Cognitively-Guided-Instruction/dp/0325001375 In Writer's Workshop we have continued our work on writing narratives, and specifically true stories. This week we focused on adding labels and speech bubbles to our drawings. This can be really helpful for students, as anything that is labeled can then be used to build sentences. Speech bubbles are a really fun way to start adding dialogue in their writing. Please feel free to encourage students to do this at home as well! For our Election Project, we have started to focus on campaigning. We read a really great book called “Grace for President” and students had a chance to write a speech to try to get people to vote for Grace or for her opponent Thomas. It has been really fun to see students building their understanding of the complex world of government and politics. One of the main things that I am hoping to get to in this project is debating. I love all of the skills that go into debating: arguing, listening, persuading etc. I would like to encourage you to watch the upcoming Presidential debate with your child (Monday Sep 26th). This year is such a crazy one in politics that I am obviously unable to say whether the entire debate will in fact be appropriate for kids, so if you are feeling nervous about that, wait until after and preview parts of it on YouTube before you watch them with your child. I would really like for students to experience the debate so that they can begin to build an understanding of what a debate is, and how candidates go about trying to convince people to vote for them. Here is an article about watching the debates with kids, and how to get the most out of it: http://ourwhitehouse.org/presidential-debates-watch-the-debates-with-your-kids-and-teens/ We have also begun to learn about political songs and how they are used to voice dissatisfaction or a desire for change. We started with “Times they are a Changin” by Bob Dylan. We have been singing it in class and having discussions about what he might be trying to express in the lyrics. The song is full of figures of speech and it has been really interesting to talk with students about idioms like “drenched to the bone” and similes like “sink like a stone.” Feel free to listen to the song at home or dive deeper into other protest/ political songs. MAP Testing This next week we are going to be doing MAP testing. This Thursday and Friday we will be doing the Language Arts Assessment, and Monday and Tuesday we will be doing the Math Assessment. Please make sure your student comes to school rested and with plenty of healthy snacks. Student Led Conferences: Student led Conferences are going to be held on October 4th and 6th this semester. SLCs are an opportunity for your child to share their experience in the classroom, reflect on their learning, and set learning goals. Each student must sign up for one 45 minute block of time, there will be 4-5 families in each block. Sign up: www.signupgenius.com/go/10c0d48a8a729abfe3-october3 Please remember that there is no school on these days, and that you are expected to homeschool. Please reach out if you have any questions, I look forward to seeing you! Comments are closed.
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AuthorWelcome to Robin's Core 2 Blog! Archives
February 2017
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