This week in Reading, Writing and Word Work

We have had our first Reading Buddies session with our 4th Graders in 2012. We were so thrilled to see and read with them again. The big boys and girls took on the leadership role in guiding and coaching our little readers in solving tricky words or parts while they read to them. What an amazing session!

This week in Readers' Workshop, I have been assessing each student on their reading level. I am happy to say that all of them have MOVED UP levels after the holidays. This is great news. Please continue to read with your child nightly at home or encourage your child to read to a sibling.
You will notice that your child is going to bring home more challenging books this week and in the next coming weeks. Now that we are reading harder texts, children would encounter more unfamiliar words that are difficult to decode. Some strategies we have been working on are: sounding it out while sweeping finger across the word, recognizing part(s) of the word (like blends, digraphs, word families), recognizing a word within a word (compound word, i.e. playground), and reading ahead and skipping the tricky word and using context and picture cues to figure it out.
Next week, we will begin guided reading again. Therefore your child will be bringing home 3 books- 2 books from our classroom library, and 1 guided reading book.

In writing, our personal narrative writers have been working on their holiday stories and writing like MAD (in a good way). They have had great enthusiasm recounting events and trips that happened during the winter holidays. Our writers now have a plethora of holiday stories in their writing folder. Yesterday, our writers went through their stories, one by one, and picked the one story that they wished to publish. We talked about how good writers reread the story they want to publish and think of ways and things they could do to make their story sound even BETTER and more INTERESTING. We read aloud a story by Donald Crews, Shortcut, and studied the many smart things Crews did in his story. We noticed that Donald Crews likes to zoom in a small moment and stretch out a tiny part and put in a lot of details. We also noticed that Crews likes to use actions as a story starter. Another cool tool that Crews uses is onomatopoeia (sounds like whoooo.... for trains). Today, our writers helped me edit and revise my story by suggesting me where I can add a sound, an action, and a dialogue. Later, they tried it in their own stories. I can't wait to read their published stories!

In word work, we have been studying spelling patterns, namely words that have a CVC pattern: consonant-vowel-consonant, (example: cat, or snap). After careful observations and studying many words with the CVC pattern, we noticed that in many cases, the vowel of these words are short. Whereas in CVCe pattern: consonant-vowel-consonant with an "e" at the end, the vowel of these words are long (example, cape, late). We also found a few "odd balls" that follows these patterns, but don't follow the "rule". For instance, the word "come" is CVCe, but the /o/ is a short vowel. This week, give your child some example with these two patterns and tell them to jot and spell it out for you.