What's in the Forsman Future?
Lexile Helpers: Hi Parents/Families! As other teachers might have expressed, we are assigning a lexile score to each of our classroom books in order to make it easier for students to select books to read that are at their level. This is very time consuming so any help that parents could give during the school day is appreciated. I would have a station set up ready to go and you could stay as little/long as you can or would like to. Please e-mail me if you are interested and able to help out. This would greatly assist our reading instruction. :) Thanks!
Spelling
We will continue to work on synonyms/antonyms and analogies this next week. Due to the extensive practice we have had in class I decided to do little quizzes after each concept instead of one giant test so the students would not get confused. There is nothing to study, I am just assessing their understanding of these word relationships. After the Thanksgiving break, we will resume regular spelling lessons and testing schedules.
Reading
We are continuing our work with Horrible Harry in Room 2B. This has proved to be a high interest book and the students have made many connections already! They love to participate and read aloud and get a lot of chances to do so. We are using graphic organizers to pull out and remember the story elements and add to these as we read further.
Reading RTI
My Tier 3 RTI group is continuing to work on the five areas of reading: fluency, phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension. We have started to talk about "genre" and how to identify what genre a story, novel, etc. is. Our group is now working in partners with short stories of varying genres to read and pull out the main idea and important details so they can summarize their literary work to the class! This gives me a chance to walk around and work with the students on a more individual level as well as fostering leadership skills and independence with our reading comprehension strategies!
Math
Chapter 5 will continue on into next week. The students are getting lots of chances to work with money and do hands-on activities in comparing values and counting change. We will also be adding and subtracting money amounts before we start the time section of the chapter. We will quiz on each concept separately so as not to confuse the students. Thank you for sending in the change baggies. This will aid your student in comprehending our lessons!
Math RTI
We will continue to preview and review the concepts from the 3rd grade math curriculum as well as supplementing with number sense intervention and review. We will continue to work on the concept of counting money and work our way to counting back change (which is typically difficult at this grade level) Please try to give your students opportunities at home to work with coins and paper money. Help them feel comfortable identifying their various values as well as counting it out, etc.
English
This week's prompt: Write questions you'd like the President of the United States to answer if you were interviewing him. Explain why these are important to you. 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. You could even make this into a creative story!
Tune in next Friday for more Forsman Fun!