What's in the Forsman Future?

Spelling
We are pretesting with List #6 on Monday of next week. Please remember that if your student receives a 90% or higher they will be working from the "challenge" list of words for their homework. All homework is due on Friday and if your student is taking the posttest, that will be Friday as well.

Reading
We will focus on the reading strategy inferencing. The students will use basal reading stories, supplemental short stories, and possibly novels to extend their practice of understanding what they read. Students will learn new vocabulary words from stories they are reading. We will also continue to work on an extended response where we use ideas from the text combined with our own ideas to answer a question.

Reading RTI
My Tier 3 RTI group is working on both fluency and comprehension daily. For fluency we are starting back at phonics practice and decoding words using the Lexia and Wilson interventions. Please help support your student and ask them to "tap out" unfamiliar words or break them down into familiar parts/sounds. For comprehension, we are using the "Soar to Success" guided reading model with a variety of fiction and non-fiction materials. I am trying also to supplement our non-fiction studies with 3rd grade social studies and science curriculum materials for comprehension practice. We progress monitor these students weekly with a one minute fluency reading. This week the students had difficulty remembering the 2 sounds that the letter "u" makes: "oo" and "uh".

Math
We are starting Chapter 1 next week. We will discuss number grids, using a numberline, and place value. We have also started taking mixed addition and subtraction fact tests on Fridays (not timed) so that the students are continually working on this. We also started discussing the "T-chart" for math which means taking a word problem and breaking it down into steps but afterwards explaining in words both what you did to solve the problem and why. This is historically difficult for students, but we are starting early and will practice often.

Math RTI
My RTI group is working on really gaining automaticity, accuracy, and speed with regards to our basic math facts. This can only aid in the understanding and accuracy of larger math problems, word problems, etc. We also have reinforced the concepts the students are learning in the classroom (4 digit addition with regrouping and 3-4 digit subtraction with borrowing and across zeros). We have also started skip counting by 2s, 3s, 5s, and 10s while discussing even and odd. We use hands on activities, technology, and movement to increase comprehension and motivation to continually practice the procedures involved. We have established baseline scores and goals through our AIMsweb computer program and will be starting to progress monitor these students shortly.

English
This week's prompt: If I could change the world, I would... Try to elaborate and add exciting details to your response. Make it into a paragraph and think of 6 sentences to support your topic sentence.

Tune in next Friday for more Forsman Fun!