Readers’ Workshop
We are focusing the beginning of our Allen Say study on three
things: noticing what’s important, recognizing the main idea, and identifying
the theme. When noticing what’s
important we want to focus on things like character traits, character
motivations, inferring character feelings, recognizing patterns, and making
predictions about the future. All of
these noticings must be based on, and supported by evidence from the text. To practice recognizing the main idea, we
have been summarizing the text in one sentence, for instance the book Tree
of Cranes, we summarized as “A young Japanese boy recovering from a bad
chill, learns about Christmas traditions from his mother.” The theme of the
story is the most important lesson(s) that can be learned from the text. The theme should not be an exact replica of a
situation in the text, but rather a broader lesson that can apply to
everyone. Practice these three skills
with your child during their nightly reading.
Writers’ Workshop
We will finish up our study of similes and metaphors before moving
on to two other forms of figurative language: personification and onomatopoeia. Personification is when you give human traits to something that is
not human, and in fact, may not even be alive. For example, the donuts called out to me. What you are really saying is that you were very tempted to
eat the donuts, but because they aren't alive, they can't actually yell at you
to eat them. An onomatopoeia is a word that
imitates the sound it is describing. For instance, boo, honk, sizzle, beep, and pop!
Biography presentations will continue, according to the classroom
schedule.
Skills Block
Our spelling homework and test will be based on List 18.
cant wait to do spelling! emma calkins
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