Posters Continued and Contractions

We continue this week working on our text to world posters. After reading The Lorax, we discussed the importance of taking care of our environment (similar to how the Lorax warned the Onceler in the story). We brainstormed some suggestions and students have been making posters of ways to conserve trees, keep our air clean and conserve water. This ties in to the grade 2 Science unit that they are currently working on with their homeroom teachers.

You will notice that this week's shared reading has a number of contractions in it. I have used this poem as a springboard for talking about contractions: what they are, how they are formed, and why they are used. Students will play a few games in which they are asked to make and deconstruct contractions. They will continue their practice of them next week during literacy centres. There will not be a shared reading next week.

More Connections

We are continuing to make connections in our reading this week. We have now completed text to self, and text to text connections, and are working on text to world and text to media connections. We will finish the unit by making posters related to our text to world readings.

Today I distributed the Decoding Strategies information sheet that I mentioned in a prior post. You can find it in your child's agenda pocket. They are encouraged to use a variety of these decoding strategies when they come to unknown words in their reading.

Connections

For the next couple of weeks, we will be discussing making connections while we read. There are three main kinds of connections that readers can make: text to self where readers find similarities between what happens in the story and their own life; text to text where they find similarities between two different books; and text to world where similarities are found between the book and the world (or community). This week we will be making text to self and text to text connections using the books "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day", "The Difficult Day", "Oliver Button" and "Amazing Grace". I invite you to encourage your children to make connections in the books that they read at home too, referencing specific examples in the books to support their answers.

We have also started using our shared reading poems and songs as a way to reinforce and practice different reading strategies such as chunking a longer word into smaller, more manageable parts, or finding smaller words inside longer ones. I will be sending home a more comprehensive list of reading strategies for your reference shortly. The more strategies students have to use when they come to unknown words in their reading, the more successful they can be deciphering it.

Apples

At the end of last week, we started to talk more about using descriptive words in our writing to make our sentences better. Using our five senses (taste, touch, sight, hearing and smell) we brainstormed five lists of different sensory descriptive words about apples while eating apples. This week students will be using these descriptive word lists to produce five complete sentences about their apples. Later we will be doing some sentence writing about things that we are thankful for, and practicing our ever-growing list of word wall words in a new game called Word Battleship. You may want to ask your child how to play this game- it is a popular one and they might enjoy playing it at home with you!

Schema

This week we are talking about schema. Schema is everything that someone knows or has experienced. Everyone has different schema since everyone has had very different experiences. I did a demonstration with a variety of shoes to demonstrate this idea. I brought in five different kinds of shoes:  a rain boot, a slipper, a fancy shoe, a running shoe and a sandal. We discussed how each shoe had experienced very different things and while the boot may have a lot of schema about mud and puddles, the sandal would have more schema about the beach, and the running shoe more schema about soccer and races. As we read, we learn new things and our schema grows. We will be comparing our schema before and after reading a variety of books this week to demonstrate that fact.

A quick note...

Next week I plan to do an writing activity with the English classes that will help them to practice using more descriptive words in their writing. It will involve each student eating an apple in class. If there are any concerns with this, please email me directly. Thank you.

A Reminder

As I previously posted, we will be starting literacy stations tomorrow. They will run until Friday. One of the stations is independent reading. While I will have a variety of books available for students to read, if they would like to bring one from home, they are welcome to.