Nonfiction Books..and Some Dates to Keep in Mind

This week in Reader's Workshop, we worked on differentiating between fiction books and nonfiction books. We talked a lot about nonfiction text features and worked with partners to find some of these features in our "just right" nonfiction books. 

As of now (if we have no snow days in the next few weeks), our 100th day of school will fall on February 6th. Our Valentine's Day celebration will take place on on February 13th. Be on the lookout for more information about both coming home soon! :)

Word Study

In word study, we have been doing a lot of work around beginning blends. Blends are two letters that stick together in a word and to make a blended sound, like "st" in the word "stem". Students at this development stage often only use one sound in their writing, so doing a lot of word work around blends helps students become more aware of both sounds when they read and write.

We have been using our sort cards to play word games, along with our usual weekly word study actvities, to build our awareness of blends in words. Please continue to encourage your child to really stretch out and write each sound they hear when working on a writing activity!

Partner work with words that start with the consonant blends sc, sw, and sn.

Fact Families

In math this week, we did a lot of work with fact families. We used what we learned about fact families to find related facts too. This is a great way for students to build their number sense! 

Launching our Nonfiction Unit

Hello all!

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had wonderful vacations. From what I've heard from the kids, it sounds like everyone had loads of fun!

This week, we are launching a big nonfiction unit in reader's and writer's workshop. Today, we did a lot of work around finding the main idea and details in a nonfiction piece of writing. We read an article about grizzly bears and discussed the main idea. Then, students went off with their partners to write some details, or important facts from the text, onto a graphic organizers to support the main idea. Check out a few pictures of us at work!