Sunday, September 28, 2014

Where we Have Been, Where We are Going…


When we start class we talk about where we have been (reviewing what we talked about in the lesson before) and where we are going (our learning goal for the day).  I thought this practice would be a new feature to my blog as well.  I hope you find it informative:

WHERE WE HAVE BEEN
Over the past six weeks we have been working very hard.  We have had to establish rituals and routines, try different strategies, and begin the hard work of slogging through a very difficult curriculum.  So far we have done a pretty good job!

SKILLS WE HAVE PRACTICED:
  • What is an adjective?  How do use adjectives?
  • Analyzing a character with text based evidence.
  • How to respond to short response questions (restating the questions, giving an answer, giving evidence to prove our answer)
  • How to read a text selection closely and carefully to find answers.
  • How text features like pictures, captions, labels, bold text and headings help us when we read non-fiction.


WHERE WE ARE GOING
For the rest of the quarter we will be finishing our novel study of the book, Because of Winn-Dixie. We will continue to work on character analysis and answer text-dependent questions.

HOW CAN I AS A PARENT HELP?
  • As your child is reading ask them questions such as:
  • What do you think will happen next? (Predicting)
  • How would you describe that character? (Character analysis)
  • Why did the character(s) do that? (Cause and effect, character motivation)
  • Why do you think the author wrote that? (Author’s purpose)
  • What happened in that chapter? (Retelling/summarizing)


HAVE A GREAT WEEK!