A Glimpse into ELA

What Have We Been Doing In Skills Block?

We have been working on Write For Today, which is daily practice in learning editing skills in our writing. This week, we have been learning about proper nouns and capitalization, -ed suffixes, there, their, they're, and commas. We have also been working on Read For Today, which is a “warm-up” daily reading where we practice careful and critical reading by using our reading strategies.

We are also learning how to write Cursive every day, by practicing each student's first and last name.

How Do We Respond To Our Independent Reading Literature?

We respond to our independent reading by writing a one sentence summary for each chapter in our Reading Journal. This is finding the MAIN IDEA of each chapter and will help us become proficient readers. By doing so, we track our reading and it helps us remember what we read. You know what’s cool? Our teachers read our summaries and write us notes about the book we read. They ask us questions, and we get to respond back. It is pretty neat writing notes back and forth to our teachers.

A Peek Into Independent Reading

Oh, to sit back with a great book and snuggle our cuddly little stuffed animal friends with classical music playing softly in the background…It doesn’t get any better than this!! Independent reading time is the best! Books take us to faraway places, and we get to meet all kinds of characters. We just love this precious time to get lost in a great book.

Painting A Picture With Words In Writers Workshop

After reading our book of the month, Otis, we used this mentor text to write descriptive paragraphs. Since we are studying nouns, we wrote about people, places, things, and ideas from this book. We wrote a descriptive paragraph on the main character, Otis. Then, we wrote a descriptive paragraph on the setting which is a farm. After that, we wrote a descriptive paragraph on the big yellow tractor which is a thing. Finally, we wrote about the idea of friendship which is the theme. We are learning that to write descriptively, we need to use our senses. Now, we can write a paragraph with a topic sentence, lots of supporting and sensory details, and a concluding sentence. (If your parent writes us a comment on this post, you, the student, will receive $10.00 in Behavior Bucks to spend at our Auction. We want all of our parents and students to read our blog daily.)