We're Studying Words!

As I mentioned at Open House, we are working with a new word development program. All students have taken the same assessment which gave the me area of spelling patterns where each student should begin their own word study. The idea behind studying the patterns vs a finite list of words is that students will recognize and generalize the patterns in the English language. This program also emphasizes the development of vocabulary a bit more than simply looking at spelling.
Each week in class, we work on the same pattern as your child is focusing on for homework. In class, we complete 3 different activities that help to develop the sense of the spelling pattern and then use ipad dictionaries or the old traditional dictionaries or thesaurus to strengthen understanding of some of the words and possible meaning.
I hope the homework will not be too labor intensive and provided authentic thinking about your child's own words. Our first spelling assessments won't be until the specific spelling section is complete. Then the words could be any words that fit the spelling pattern the student has worked on in the previous weeks. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the program or homework.

It's Monday What Are You Reading?

This week I have 2 great read aloud books planned. First, we will continue empathizing with the main character, Elizabeth, in the book called The Perfect Pet. Elizabeth shows great strong-girl character traits of having her mind made up to get a pet, but when her parents won't allow any of the many animals she chooses she makes an interesting decision that shows she is really a flexible and easy going character.
We continue on in the week, and in our Understanding Characters unit, to "making a mental movies" of the text and coming to understand a character by "walking in our character's shoes." These lessons take us through the process of getting deep into our reading as if we were actually part of the story. As a mentor text for these lessons, I have chosen the book, Amazing Grace. We will listen to that book being read on an on-line video. This will be a lesson that allows us to gaining understanding of  text through listening. We will then incorporate the think notes that we made about Grace with our notes we made about Elizabeth earlier in the week and write about the main characters similarities and differences. Both skills, comprehension through listening and comparing characters from different texts are valuable skills for comprehension and successful completion of the Smaterbalance assessment.
Additionally, we will continue our small group partnership book club reading that we got started on last week. Ask your child about our character trait unit and how he/she is enjoying the partnership book  club.

Reading Strategies

Room 24 students are working hard to get to know characters in the books we are reading. As third grade readers who have crossed the threshold from learning to read to reading to learn, we have started working hard to utilize reading comprehension strategies. The strategies for comprehending text are: Predicting, Questioning, Connecting, Visualizing, Inferring and Summarizing. A brief description is:
Predicting: Using clues from the text to make good guesses about what might happen next in the story.
Questioning: Asking and answering questions about the text while reading.
Connecting: Making connections helps bring meaning to the text. There are three types of connections. Text to Text, Text to Self and Text to World. These are likenesses drawn between another text or the world and the book being read.
Visualizing: Readers create a picture in his/her mind based on the author's words.
Inferring: Using what was read in the text and the reader's background knowledge to figure out messages that are not directly stated.
Summarizing: Paraphrasing a section of the text to verify your own understanding.

Each day during our whole class lesson I model the use of reading comprehension strategies that a good reader should do while reading. Slowly students take over and begin to share their thinking, about our whole class reading and then practicing this in by jotting think notes about his/her independent reading. As we read we are using these reading comprehension strategies to better understand the text and "figure out" the characters we are reading about. Your child will be familiar these strategies and can explain how he/she uses each one during reading.