Review, Review, Review!

Review, Review, Review is what the Stars have been doing this week!

We began with putting all the Elements of Fiction together. I read a loud the book A Bad Case of Stripes by David Shannon. The students have been begging me to read this book, which has been sitting on the bookshelf since the first day of school! I promised them it was coming soon, and Monday was the day. They really enjoyed the read-aloud. We stopped throughout identifying the Elements of Fiction using a narrative organizer I borrowed from Working 4 the Classroom, she offers it as a freebie. We also used the vocabulary in this book to determine word meanings using context clues. Before reading, I introduced students to 10 words we would encounter throughout the book. I told them to listen carefully as I read and raise your hand when they heard one of the words read. After reading, I used this awesome powerpoint I found at Classroom Magic to teach determining the meaning of words in context. At our writing center this week, student's are practicing their first Reader's Response Letter using the read aloud text by writing a summary of the plot and adding some thinking while they are reading.

In Social Studies this week, we are also reviewing all of the Map Skills we have discussed thus far. My student teacher and one of our inclusion teachers created power points for us to use as a review with the students. You can check them out here and here!

We are also working on our first Social Studies Research project. Last week, we introduced the class to their topic the Appalachian Mountains. I modeled for students why we would want to generate questions on a topic. After I modeled, students turned and talked to their partner to generate 3 questions on the Appalachian Mountains. Then we brainstormed resources we could use to answer our questions. Since this is our first research project, we are focusing on using only a non-fiction book on the mountains. So, this week the students are creating outlines from their questions they generated. Then they created a Flee Map from the information in their outline, and finally wrote their final paper. Most students finished Friday and posted their informational report on their blog. You can check them out here!

During our English block this week, we are studying how to write titles and correct run-on sentences. The students learning goal was I can write titles correctly using capitalization and underlining and I can correct run-on sentences by separating the two sentences with a period and then capitalizing the first word of the second sentence. It is very important they understand the purpose for the lesson and be able to ask themselves at the end of the lesson if they accomplished the goal. Here's a sample of what the students were working on.

After they completed a few titles independently, students were called to the board to correct a few titles using capitalization and underlining.

Next week, we will be studying Theme, working on our first writing prompt, studying Regions, discussing words with Suffixes, and an introduction to Resources.