Week 3

We are almost finished with our Three Questions project.  This week, we finished out mural of the setting of the book, and we started talking about the characters and what advice they had about being a good person.

In Reading, we talk about how good readers "put the pieces of a book together" in their minds.  They think of all aspects of a story to get a complete picture.  We are doing a book study of "A Chair for my Mother."  As the year goes on, students will be able to pick the book they want to do a book study on, but for the first one, I wanted us all to do the same book.

Here we are making a cover page in our journal.

Now we are talking about the first puzzle piece, the characters in a book.  All books have characters (who or what the story is about), in our story, we identified the main character and 2-3 supporting characters.

 This week, marked the first time we selected spelling words.  To start the year off, we are focusing on word chunks.  We thought of words that featured the word chunk "am."  I told the students, if you can spell jam, you can spell camera......the word chunk is the same, you just have to build the word around the chunk!

Sorry, these pictures are upside down....I can't rotate them in blogger!!!

Look at all the words the kids came up with......I didn't come up with ANY of these!!!!   The rules were, the words had to be real words, and they had to use the word chunk "am."  AMAZING!

Once we had our class list, students chose 10 of the words for their own personal spelling list.  Words that are a good fit for them.  Students are still learning what a good fit is for them, so this will take some trial and error.  We talked about getting a mixture of words....easy to challenging.

They also looked at the HIGH FREQUENCY WORD LIST, and chose 5 words off that list to study and to work on this week.

We did so much this week, but I didn't bring out my camera too much, it seemed we THAT busy!  I am excited to see families at Back to School night on Thursday.  Come for the ice cream at 6:00!  Afterwards, your child will show you all the amazing things we have done so far in the classroom!