Synonym BINGO

Friday we reviewed synonyms from last week. This week students had a choice of playing Synonym BINGO or Synonym Go Fish.

For synonym BINGO I gave students some very challenging words to write on their BINGO board. I would then call out a synonym and use it in a sentence that would help them determine its meaning. We had several BINGOs.

Idioms

This week we studied idioms. Idioms are so much fun and we had a blast reading examples of them and using them in our daily conversations.

We made an idiom picture in a frame. Each student selected two idioms. They wrote the idiom at the top of their paper, illustrated the idiom's literal meaning, and then wrote its actual meaning. 

They turned out so cute!  Here are a few examples:

If I found a pot of gold...

We are currently working on our writing skills.  We started small by writing a simple paragraph.  Our paragraph told what we would do if we found a pot of gold.  Some of the students ideas were to:  shop, buy a mansion, meet Justin Beiber, go to several concerts, and live in the White House.

Favorite Candy

Last week during Daily Three the students were asked to complete a writing activity about their favorite candy.  Our focus skill for the week was adjectives so I thought that allowing them to describe their favorite candy using adjectives would be fun. 
Today we began listening to each students' description.  As we listened to them describe their favorite candy we tried to guess what it could possibly be.

One of our wonderful desciptions was:
My favorite candy is sweet.  When I put it in my mouth it melts.  It has a lot of flavor.  It is pink and blue.  You can get this candy at the fair.  It is very soft.  I love this candy because it can't crack your teeth.  This candy doesn't come in a wrapper.  Some of them come on a cone or in a plastic bag.  This candy makes me very hyper.  When you ball it up it makes it a little chewable.  This candy is very popular.  It looks a lot like died cotton.

By:  Hannah Cohn

Can you guess what Hannah's favorite candy is?  We all guessed pretty quickly because of her great description.  The only adjective I could think to add would be FLUFFY!

Strong Verbs

This week we are learning about strong verbs.  We are replacing weak verbs like ate with strong verbs like gobbled, munched, and devoured. 

Today we did a fun play to get us started and help us think about our use of verbs.

Our Cast Members:

Hannah - Announcer

Lorelei - Weak Verb

Jake - Strong Verb

Kailee - Groupie Girl

Learning to Write

Today we began our first mini-lesson on writing.  We thought it would be best to put first things first and review how to correctly write a sentence.  We decided that every sentence needs 4 things:  1.)  a subject/noun 2.) a predicate/verb 3.) a capital letter at the beginning 4.)  an end mark

We spent 15 minutes working on a free write which means each student was able to write about ANYTHING they wanted to as long as they wrote the ENTIRE time.

We used our handy-dandy name generator to select 3 students to share their stories with us.

Sam shared about Snail Bob and a crazy marriage proposal.

Nykia shared about her teacher from last year, Mrs. Morris.

Hudson shared about his trip to Enterprise, AL to play in the All-Star State Championship Tournament.

Self-Portraits & Autobiographical Poems

Yesterday we began working on a guess who self-portrait to hang in the hallway.

The inside of this self-portrait will host an autobiography poem.  Today we generated several lists of ideas to help us write our poems.



Essays

We have begun writing our first 5-paragraph essay of this school year.  We are writing about our favorite holiday.

Each student began by making a story-web.

 They then started working on their 3 body paragraphs.

We will work on our rough drafts, then peer-edit & teacher conference, and finally publish.  I can't wait to see how great these turn out.

Pen Pals

Throughout the year I have received several letters from students.  Each time I receive a letter I can't help but notice that my students do not know how to correctly write a letter.  E-mail is such a wonderful thing, but we have lost some basic fundamentals because of it.

To help us learn how to correctly write a letter, and to help us become better writers, we have decided to become pen pals with Mrs. O'Hara's class at Ben Davis.  The younger kids will love receiving letters form the big kids, and I know the big kids will look forward to their letters just as much as the younger one.  

Simile City

We learned that similes can help to improve our writing by making our stories come alive to our readers.  We learned that similes compare two things using the words like or as.

Action Verbs and Strong Verbs

Today we took a look at Action Verbs.  We discussed action verbs like running, writing, and drinking.  We took each of those verbs and came up with better/stronger verbs that are synonyms for the words.  For drinking we used words like slurping, gulping, and sipping.  For writing students came up with printing, scribbling, scripting, and outlining.  For running the other word choices were sprinting, jogging, galloping, and skipping.  We talked about how strong verbs help writers paint word pictures and create mind movies for their readers.

Tuesday and Wednesday Catch-Up

Culture Brainstorm

On Tuesday we began a class brainstorm list about culture.  Each student told me what they know about culture and they even added the different ways people can express themselves to our list.  We got a lot of great responses and a great jump start to our first IB unit.  My main question to the class during our brainstorm was, "Are cultures and countries the same thing?"  Ask your child what they think about that question!

Reading Goals

As we began reading workshop on Tuesday afternoon we took some time to set 2 goals for ourselves as readers.  The goals could be for improvement in comprehension, accuracy, or responsibility, and a goal could also be about what type(s) of books/genres they may wish to try.  Ask your child what his or her current reading goals are and how they plan to achieve them.

Spelling Menu!

On Tuesday we also learned what our spelling menu item choices are.  Here is a list of menu choices in case you need to reference them at some point.  They are also listed on the classroom website.  www.dcs.edu/webpages/lupton

Writer's Workshop
Getting an Idea

During writer's workshop we have a mini-lesson that focuses on a new skill and then we spend about 30 minutes practicing that new skill.  We keep all of our notes from mini-lessons in our writer's notebooks and then we have our writing sample behind our mini-lesson notes.  Today's skill was 'Getting an Idea'.  Good writer's need to know how to come up with an idea for writing so today we spent a little time getting a jump-start on a list of ideas.  We began brainstorming topics we could write about and came up with quite a nice list!

This is a picture of student's writing using their new list of ideas.  Today they were able to choose their own topic to write about!

The City of Ember

Main Characters & Setting

Compare & Contrast

We have been reading The City of Ember for about a week and a half now and we have been introduced to quite a few characters.  Today we took some time to create a poster to hang in our classroom to remind us of some of the main characters.  We also took a few minutes to discuss what the setting of a story is and to talk about the setting of The City of Ember.

The City of Ember also goes along with our culture unit.  The people of Ember have a very different culture from us.  We also learned that there are a few things that are similar between our culture and their culture.  Through this thought we learned that although there are many cultures that are all very different, they are also all very similar!

This is our Venn Diagram we constructed to compare and contrast our world and our cultures vs. the City of Ember and their culture.

Reader's Workshop

Expanding Our Vocabulary

Today in Reader's Workshop our focus was ways to expand our vocabulary.  We learned there are many ways to learn new words but the most important thing to remember is that when we come across a new word while reading we should find out it's meaning!  To practice this skill as an entire class we read a short non-fiction, informational book about butterflies.

While reading the book Butterfly we came across the word chrysalis.  Many of us were unfamiliar with the word chrysalis so we had to use a strategy to determine the meaning of the word.  The strategy we were able to use while reading this book was to look at the pictures around the word to help determine the meaning of the word.  We were able to look at the picture below and determine that a chrysalis is similar to a cocoon.

Other strategies we learned we could use are:
-ask an adult
-look up the word in the dictionary
-use context clues

Students then used their reader's notebooks as they read to record words they were unfamiliar with. Their challenge was to find out the meaning of the word by using one of our new strategies. We learned lots of new words through this activity today!

Glyphs and Writer's Notebooks

Today was our first day to meet for math.  We will meet every day from 9:00 - 10:00.  Today in math we learned what will be expected in class, we made a glyph, and we played multiplication kickball with Mr. Holmes' math class.  I forgot my camera at home today so I had to take video.  Here is a video of the kids working on their football glyphs.

We also learned about writing in class today.  We set up our writer's notebooks and reviewed what we know about sentences and paragraphs.  After our review we wrote about our first day at school.