Mrs. Lewis' Classroom News

 January 4, 2010

Reading: Target Skill - Author's Purpose/Point of View

• Identify the author of a text
• Identify whether they think the author wrote something funny, serious, sad, or exciting. Evaluating an author's purpose for writing a story helps children understand and appreciate that the goal of an author is to communicate ideas.
• Genre Study - Understand characteristics of fables
• Practice summarizing a story as a strategy for comprehension
• Practice reading fluently. Students will have a fluency check each week. At this time students should be reading between 20 -30 words per minute. Please practice reading the decodable readers. Practice will help increase fluency and comprehension.

Practice the following words

• High-Frequency Words - again - feel - house - know - loud - Mrs. - put - say - something
• Robust Vocabulary - approached - energetic - pace - blunder - reassure - excel
• Spelling Words - she - too - keep - same - more - we'll - shack - went - tablet - brushing - their - goes
• Sentence Dictation - The deck is next to their pool. The fish had a hook stuck in its gill.

Phonics

• Review vowel y - long /i/ sound of vowel y and long /e/ sound of vowel y
• Introduce combination er - When two letters come together to make an unexpected sound, we call those letters a combination.
• Code and read compound words
• Review suffixes -s, -ed, -ing
• Introduce suffixes - less, -ness, -ly
• Introduce vowel digraph ai and ay
• Practice putting words in ABC order

Math

• Write a number sentence to solve a problem
• Practice measuring length using nonstandard units
• Identify pairs
• Exploring Fact Families
• Identify characteristics of shapes (cones cubes, sphere, rectangular prism, cylinder)
• Patterns

Writing

• Write sequence stories using sequence words (first, next, then, finally).
• Write poetry
• Practice proofreading sentences
• Grammar - use capitalization skills to capitalize proper nouns

Reminders

• Reading Goal has been increased to 20 books per month. Please be sure your child is reading every night and recording books read on the reading log. A story is sent home to read Monday-Thursday. Be sure to record reading homework assignments on the reading log.
• Jan.11th - Book Order Due
• Jan. 19th - T-Shirt Order Due