Flashcards and More!

This week's vocabulary words and meanings in a tagxedo picture.

Literacy
First of all, I want to let you know that students can study the vocabulary for Unit 4 Week 3 by practicing the flashcards at the following link.   http://www.flashcardmachine.com/1819342/f3p5
They do not need to know the exact definition of the word, however, they should know what the word means and how to pronounce the word.

Also, I've sent home fluency passages for kids to practice.  This week's passage is in the form of a skit.

We were very busy in literacy today, and we even found time for library!  While some of the students celebrated a birthday in their homeroom, the rest of us classified spelling words as nouns or adjectives.  This is such a difficult concept.  We will keep working on it.   Speaking of spelling, students have a spelling worksheet to do for homework tonight.  It is a passage in which some of the spelling words are written incorrectly, and they must correct them.  I've attached another spelling list to the words just in case.

Tomorrow we will start reading a new story called Twins, and I will send it home so students can reread it and fill in a graphic organizer with facts they learn from the story.  The story can also be read online if you click on the Lead 21 link (found in the right hand column) and login with the student's username and password.  The password for each student is read. 

We took 15 minutes to do a Making Words lesson today.  Making Words is when I choose a big word and we spell words that can be made from the letters in that big word.  Students have all the letters in front of them and they use my clues to arrange the letters to make the words.  They write the words on a sheet and then use words we've made to help them spell additional words.


For example, our big word today was the superlative BRIGHTEST.  Remember last week when we worked on comparatives and superlatives?  Anyway the students used the letters to spell the following words: hit, sit, site, hire, tire, tight, sight, right, bright, bitter, hitter, sitter, tighter, and then the big word, brightest.

Tomorrow we will focus on sorting and transferring the homophones, related words and rhyming patterns. 

• We will sort for homophones (site and sight) and for related words (bright/brightest, tight/tighter, hit/hitter, sit/sitter).  We will discuss the relationship between these words and the spelling changes that occur when writing related words.

• We will sort for rhymes. (sight/tight/right/bright, tire/hire, hit/sit, hitter/sitter/bitter)

• And then we will transfer the related words and rhyming patterns by spelling new words. (lightest, kinder, batter  and wire, slight, glitter, and critter.)

I will send a blank sheet home tomorrow for students to work on making words out of the big word brightest.  This will reinforce the lesson.  Feel free to help and use the words I listed above if you get stuck.


The students also worked on their Simile Writing project.  I think you will enjoy seeing them when they are done, especially since they are writing things about their family.  :)

Math
We worked on making circle graphs using the percent circle on our math templates.  We then looked at the graphs to make sure that they made sense.  For example, did 27% look like just a tad more than 1/4 of the circle?  Was 46% close to half of the circle?  As I stated in the homework section on the right, students can check their homework tonight (Study Link 5.11) by clicking on the Fraction Practice tab and inputting the data in their problem into the Make A Circle Graph website.  They will be able to compare their graph with the one the computer makes.


Have a good night!