Mrs. Wood’s Classroom Blog

Opening: We did the DLRs for both today and yesterday since we skipped yesterday’s.

Math: We briefly reviewed the math test the students took yesterday. The students did quite well on this test! We had a few students in the high 90%’s and one who even scored a perfect 100! Way to go!

Writing: We’ve been practicing writing friendly letters and since Mr. Nassar’s in-laws gave us a nice new copy of The Polar Express we wrote thank you cards to them.

Library (Students simply turned in books this week due to having 2 weeks off school)

Recess/Lunch

Literacy Block
Guided Reading – We took the assessment test for A Trip to the Firehouse that we read last week.

Working with Words – We continued working on rhyming pairs and did _ot endings and _ill endings.

Holiday  Movie/Party: We watched The Polar Express on our big screen and enjoyed cupcakes courtesy of Sonia’s mom and juice boxes and suckers provided by myself and one of the paraprofessionals in our school. Students received a treat bag to take home.

Have a wonderful winter break, see  you in 2008!

*We skipped our opening activity today in order to move our seating assignments. Due to the students sitting at tables, its easier to have them move their things from table to table.

Math: We took our Unit 5 math assessment today. I read the directions to each problem for the students because at this point, I want to test them on the content, rather than if they can read the test or not.

Physical Education

Read Aloud: We read more from our book. We’re almost done with it!

Santa’s Secret Shop: We visited the Santa shop where the students were able to buy for family members. A real bargain too because everything was only $1!

Lunch

Literacy Block
Guided Reading – We did a vocabulary activity today. We reviewed our vocabulary words from A Trip to the Firehouse and each group was assigned a word. Their job was to find the word in the story, give its definition, use it in a sentence and then draw a picture of it.

Working with Words – We did a rhyming activity where the students had to add beginnings to create words that ended with op (such as hop or mop).

Self Selected Reading

Recess

Read Aloud: We read more from The Tale of Despereaux.

Writing: We continued working on our friendly letters. Mr. Nassar surprised us during this time by stopping in to give us a class present. His inlaws always give him a book each year and he presents it to one of his teachers — this year he chose to give it to us because I am the newest teacher at Harrison and our class is the newest formed class We were very excited to receive a hard copy of The Polar Express. Thank you, Mr. Nassar!

Homework: Reading Comprehension

Opening: Students completed Daily Language Review for Wednesday, week 6.

Math: We reviewed for our unit test which is tomorrow. We reviewed parallel lines, lines of symmetry, sorting by attributes and shapes. We also reviewed the different kinds of shapes (if it has 3 sides, its a triangle; 4 sides its a quadrangle, etc.)

Interventions: For interventions today, we reformed our groups and re-read the stories we read yesterday. Each group was required to complete a graphic organizer on main idea and details which was our story focus from our anthology story A Trip to the Firehouse.

Read Aloud: We normally have library on Wednesday morning but Mrs. Vallone was sorting RIF books so we will go on Friday instead. During part of this time, I read some of The Tale of Despereaux to the students. I really want to finish this book this week so it was a nice way to use our time.

Self-Selected Reading

Recess/Lunch

Literacy Block:
Guided Reading - We read a story called Watch out for Thick Mud! in our phonics readers. This story talked about an animal rescue company who goes out to rescue Sasha, an elephant, who was stuck in thick mud. The other animals go to rescue her and use ropes and poles to try to pull her out. They get her out and she says “what’s going on” and they explain how she was stuck in the mud. She says, “no I was taking a mud bath” The kids really enjoyed this story. We created a flow map to sequence out the events that happened in the story.

Working with Words – We did a making words activity and practiced our word wall words.

Self Selected Reading

Art

Writing: We continued to work on our friendly letter writing.

Homework: Study for math test; study sheet signed by parent

Opening: Students completed Daily Language Review for Tuesday, week 6.

Assembly: We are going to start having behavior and incentive assemblies once per month. We want to recognize good students in our school who put forth best effort. Today we recognized all students who had perfect attendance since school began (53 students total). Congratulations to those students! Also we had a drawing to give away 2 bicycles and 2 gift certificates for students who show strong effort in school. 2 second graders won the lower elementary prizes. Congratulations to all of the winners!

Math: We finished math lesson 5.9 on line symmetry that we began yesterday. We looked at different shapes on our pattern block templates and decided how we could fit those shapes onto a piece of another shape to make a line of symmetry.

Interventions: I am super lucky to work with two awesome reading teachers, Mrs. Bandyk and Mrs. Riley. They have really helped advocate for our class and pull together some leveled readers for us to use during interventions. We owe them a BIG thank you! Thanks to their perseverance in getting us the materials I wanted, we were able to begin interventions with our leveled stories. We have 3 groups — one group meets independently to work on a story, one group works with Miss Ecy, one of our paraprofessionals, and one works with me. Today each group did a vocabulary sheet for our story and a picture walk or read the book. The best part about these leveled reader is that they coincide with the stories in our reading books and work on the same strategies — they just provide the strategy at a level where the students can comfortably read.

Writing: We are continuing to work on writing a friendly letter. Today we reviewed the 5 parts of a friendly letter and then wrote a draft of our letter.

Silent Reading

Recess/Lunch

Literacy Block:
Guided Reading – During guided reading today, we looked at a phonics reader called Jay the Mailman. We have been talking about ai and ay vowel pairs and this book has a lot of them! We got out our highlighters and highlighted each ai or ay pair we found. Boy were there a lot of them! We also read the story through together once before we did the highlighting so the students would already be familiar with the text.

Working with Words – We did a guess the covered word lesson. The kids think it is so funny when I put their names into the sentences!

Self-Selected Reading

Recess: Unfortunately due to some misbehavior our class spent recess indoors with our heads down thinking about our choices. I hate to do this, especially when the kids work so hard in the afternoon, but they do need to understand that school is for learning and they need to follow the rules in order to learn.

Read Aloud: We’re still working on The Tale of Despereaux. We’re all on the edges of our seats waiting to see what happens next!

Science: We have been talking about animals and classifying them into categories. Today we revisited a lesson we had previously done on body coverings and the different ways some animals move. What we did today was take the information we already knew and put them into tree maps which is a nice way of showing information that fits into different categories.

Homework: None due to our program this evening.

The countdown has officially begun! Can you believe its almost 2008?!

Opening: Students worked on Daily Language Review – Monday, Week 6.

Music: Students had their music program rehearsal. The program is tomorrow night — hope to see you there!

Interventions: We completed a Parts of Speech lesson today. We will start doing these lessons only once peer week. They are good practice but we got our leveled readers thanks to Mrs. Bandyk and Mrs. Riley so we will start using those for our interventions.

Writing: This week we are working on a writing a friendly letter. Today’s lesson included discussing the 5 parts of a friendly letter (date, opening, body, closing, signature).

Silent Reading

Recess/Lunch

Literacy Block:
Guided Reading – We reviewed the ERT questions at the end of our story A Trip to the Firehouse. Students were divided into groups (not the groups they normally sit with) and each group was assigned a question. Their job was to work together to find the answer to the question in the text and share their answer with the class.

Working with Words – We looked at our new word wall words for this week. We chanted them, clapped them and wrote them down.

Self-Selected Reading

Recess (Students spent recess indoors to think about their behavior during group work and how they need to behave in class — overall they are doing better but sometimes they just need a few reminders.)

Read Aloud: We are continuing to read from The Tale of Despereaux. I hope to have this story finished by the end of the week so that we can move on to another story right after break. We’re almost done with it and the kids really seem to be enjoying how the story is coming full circle on itself.

Math: We started lesson 5.9 which is on Line Symmetry. We did not finish the lesson because its a longer one but the kids got the opportunity to be more “hands on” with this lesson. We started with a shape they had to guess what it was. They all guessed it was a star. We folded it on the line and cut it cut it out and sure enough we ended up with a star. Then we cut out a leaf, a football, a rectangle and a square to see how many lines of symmetry each had. Tomorrow will will finish this lesson and use our templates to draw the other half of some pattern block shapes.

Homework: Homelink 5.8

Opening: Students completed Daily Language Review – Friday, Week 5.

Math: We worked on math lesson 5.7 which dealt with 3-D shapes. Students have been bringing in shapes from home for our “shape museum” and we talked about the different shapes they had brought in. We had several rectangular prisms, some cylinders and even a pyramid. The students practiced identifying different objects by the shape they most resemble (for example, a globe is like a sphere).

Interventions: We did a Parts of Speech lesson today. The students are getting better at these!

Writing: Students prepared to publish their informational writing pieces.

Silent Reading

Recess/Lunch

Literacy Block
Guided Reading – We previewed the ERT (everyone read to..) questions students will do on Monday. We then did a practice test to help us with main idea and details. I showed the students how to go back and prove their answers were right (a GREAT skill for that MEAP they’ll take next year). I don’t expect them to use that strategy much yet but we will practice it throughout the year.

Working with Words – We took our spelling test for this week and practiced our word wall words.

Self-Selected Reading

Recess

Classroom Meeting: We discussed the importance of doing our best and making good choices.

Catch up/AFC: Many of the students had not finished their writing piece so we used this make up time to allow them to finish it. Students who did finish and didn’t have other outstanding work that needed to be completed could play with the centers games.

Homework: none

Opening: Students worked on Daily Language Review – Thursday, Week 5.

Math: We worked on lesson 5.6 on Quadrangles. This lesson reviewed what parallel lines are and showed the students how to make quadrangles that had parallel lines or did not have parallel lines. They got to use rulers to draw their own quadrangles in their math journals.

Physical Education

Computer Lab

Silent Reading

Recess/Lunch

Literacy Block:
Guided Reading – Today we reviewed our flow map that we created yesterday. Then we listened to the story A Trip to the Firehouse on CD. After listening to the story, we completed a graphic organizer that helped us to find details to support the main idea that the children saw a lot of exciting things at the firehouse.

Working with Words – We cheered our word wall words for the week and completed some grammar activities that included ai and ay words.

Sustained Silent Reading (SSR)

Recess

Read Aloud – We read from The Tale of Despereaux

Writing: We continued to work on our informational writing. Many students are almost finished with them. I have been conferencing with the students to help them fix errors and make their piece more interesting and/or flow better. They are doing a great job and we are excited to share our writing with the class!

Homework: Homelink 5.6

Opening: Students completed Daily Language Review, Wednesday – Week 5.

Class Meeting: We briefly discussed yesterday (there was a guest teacher) and the expectations that remain in place when any adult is in our classroom.

Math: We worked on lesson 5.5 which dealt with Parallel lines. We talked about what makes lines parallel (they are the same distance apart from each other, going the same direction and will never touch). We looked at some pictures of parallel lines and some pictures of non-parallel lines. I like to use a lot of visuals with this age of students and it really seemed to help them understand.

Interventions: Today we worked on short o sounds and u_e sounds like in flute (it has a consonant between the u and e).

Library

Silent Reading

Recess/Lunch

Literacy Block
Guided Reading – We discussed flow maps today. Flow maps are a type of thinking map that help us to sequence information. I showed the students an example of a flow map and then we read the story, A Trip to the Firehouse. It was a long story with a lot of good information in it. We echo read this story together (I read a few words, they repeat it while they follow along) and then created our own flow maps. They did pretty good for the first try!

Working with Words – We did a making words activity. These are great lesson for helping students to see how we can make words from other words we already know. Our secret word this time was “rudolph” (like the reindeer).

Art

Writing: We continued to work on our informational piece. I encouraged the students to get their thoughts all down on the paper from their bubble maps that we used to organize our information so that tomorrow when we begin to edit them, they will have most of their information written and it’ll be easier to make changes to.

Homework: Homelink 5.5

Opening: Students completed Daily Language Review for Tuesday – Week 5.

Anti-bullying Assembly

Math: The students finished lesson 5.4 and worked on math boxes that we had not gotten to on other days.

Interventions: Students worked on short e and “ew” sounds.

Writing: Students continued working on their informational article writing. They had all of their information in a bubble map that we completed Monday and were transferring that information to a written draft.

Silent Reading

Recess/Lunch

Literacy Block
Guided Reading – Students worked on a short reading activity that gives them practice with the strategy focus for the current story. In this case, the focus is main idea and details. They read a short story and then completed an organizer to show the details they gleaned from the story.

Working with Words – Students completed a guess the covered word activity and reviewed word wall words.

Silent Reading

Recess

Read Aloud: Students were read to from The Tale of Despereaux.

Science: Students worked on a Life Cycle activity. They looked at the life cycle of frogs (because it fit in with the animal unit and is our class theme). They read about the frog cycle and then colored and cut out a flip book that shows the life cycle of a frog from the eggs up to the adult frog stage.

Homework: Homelink 5.4, Frog Life Cycle reading comprehension

Opening: Students completed DLR for week 6, Monday.

Music

Interventions: We completed another Parts of Speech lesson. This time students did them on paper so we can use them more than once and see our growth.

Writing: We are doing another writing project like we did last week – an informational article on an animal. Today students selected a new book and read it. Their task for today was to begin their bubble map to help organize the information they want to write about.

Silent Reading

Recess/Lunch

Literacy Block
Guided Reading – We previewed the vocabulary for our new story, A Trip to the Firehouse, which is a non-fiction story. We discussed the vocabulary, read a short introduction to the new story and then completed two short workbook pages using the vocabulary words.

Working with Words - We introduced our new words for the week and practiced writing them. We also chanted and clapped our words.

Silent Reading

Recess

Read Aloud – We read more from The Tale of Despereaux

Math: We looked at lesson 5.4 which deals with points and line segments. A point in geometry is any point in space, it can be the end of a line or shape also. A line segment is a line that connects two points. Students will continue working with this lesson tomorrow.

Silent Reading

Homework: Snowflake Reading Comprehension activity