Reading and Writing

We've been writing text-to-self and text-to-text connections in our Reading Response Journals.  The students have great ideas and are making great connections.  This week, we'll be talking about text-to-world connections.  I've been reminding the students about capital letters at the beginning of the sentence and periods at the end of the each sentence.  The students have been erasing and fixing their work.  Starting this week, you might start seeing some papers the say "Retrain your Brain".  Students will be using this paper to rewrite sentences with a capital letters and periods so it becomes automatic.  In the beginning, I have a lot of students who have to rewrite and after awhile I have very few students rewriting because they have "retrained their brain".

Today I'm sending home a reading test that your child took last week.  You can review the reading test with your child and talk about any errors.  During the reading test, students were able to ask if they didn't know a word.  I encouraged students to reread the story if they weren't sure of an answer and we talked about reading all of the answer choices before choosing an answer.

During Writer's Workshop over the last few weeks, we've been writing about family fun and "it happened to me" stories.  I taught them how to use a graphic organizer to organize their thoughts before writing.  We've been talking about adding interesting details to their stories and last week we added sound words to our stories.  We've talked a lot a capital letters at the beginning of every sentence and a period at the end of every sentence.  We've also been practicing writing complete sentences.  Today, I'm sending home the writing assessment for 1st quarter. The writing assessment was given over two days and students were encouraged to use their 2nd grade dictionary if they needed help with spelling.