Unit 5 Week 4






Kindergarten
sight words
little
said

Please help your children learn the new sight words.

letter
k

Our story this week is called It Was Here!
It is about a farmer who went to his garden and saw big holes in it.
  Ask your student if they remember what happened to the vegetables carrot, pumpkin and melon.
We will practice phoneme deletion like "now say pup without the p." We want the children to blend words like kit, kite and kin. Also bus, cup and fun.
My students always seem to enjoy this.
We will also sing a song about a farmer in his garden and review the words in, out, over and under.  We will also discuss top, middle and bottom.
 Then we will enjoyed using our retelling cards and practice drawing conclusions too.  Everyone seems to have a different idea.
It will be a busy week.



Grade 1
Swim Like a Dolphin
 is a realistic fiction story about a boy who often walked by the water's edge and saw dolphins swimming in the ocean.  It tells about his trials and errors in taking a swim class and how eventually he and his dad swim like dolphins in the ocean.  It focuses on learning new things while growing up.
Our vocabulary skill this week will be the inflected endings ed and ing.  We will work on figuring out what verb ending should go on a verb.  Then we we will look at words with or. Often this sound is harder for us to remember but very important.  Examples horse is not a house.  Then we will look at pictures and read two sentences. We will have fun deciding which sentence matches the pictures.  Last we will review our number words.
Sight words this week are
along
early
nothing
thought




Grade 2
All About Pumpkins
This story is an informational nonfiction book about the pumpkin family, how pumpkins grow and the value of eating pumpkins.  It  sequences the  growth of the pumpkins, how to make a pumpkin pie and how to carve a pumpkin.  Then it tells about other different types of food that are made from pumpkins as well as fun pumpkin facts, like the biggest pumpkin weighed 1000 pounds! It is very  informative.  Then I will bring in a zucchini and a cucumber and we will compare  how they all are alike and  different by using a Venn diagram.
We will then work on homophones and look at context clues to determine which one of the homophones are correct.  In the phonic lesson the students will learn that when kn and gn are together they say n and when wr is together it says r. Since sequencing is so important in writing we will also work on sequencing stories. Last we will practice finding the correct verb when we have a pronoun for a subject.
Sight words this week are
air
do
Earth
only


Grade 3 will read a story about
Blizzard Heroes but first we will make predictions about who or what would rescue us if there was a blizzard.  It is a nonfiction story about what a blizzard is, to how we track blizzards today.  It also tells of long ago famous blizzards and what people did when they were caught in a blizzard.  It also tells what we use today when a disaster occurs like using National Guard troops to flying helicopters to using rescue dogs to Red Cross providing shelters when people can't get home to having snow plots to dig  us out. We will be surprised that there were so many resources to draw from when we are stranded.  We will learn new words like avalanche and whiteout.  Then we will write about and discuss what you should have in your home if a blizzard is predicted and why it is important for people to listen to weather reports.
Figurative Language is our vocabulary skill this week and we will use context clues to help us figure out the language.
Then we will practice dividing VC/CV Syllables and worked on Pronoun-Verb Agreement using the subject pronouns.
Last we will confirm our predictions.




Grade 4
Girl Arranging Her Hair
It is a historical fiction book about Mary Cassatt an American impressionist painter in the late 1800's who worked in Paris and drew female and familiar family scenes.  In this particular story it tells the way in which Mary found a subject to paint and why the girl Louise decided to sit for so many hours with Madam Cassatt.  It focused on what it takes to be a good model and what it is that people like about paintings. Ask your children what Louise thought would happen when she sat for the artist and what really happened.
We will have an exercise where we look at unfamiliar underlined words and then read the text around them to determine what the word means.  Then we will learn about the schwa +r. I call it one of the er sisters and their cousins ar and or.  Next we will work on comprehension of details and analyze what the details show about the character.  Last we will learn about comparing and when to use more and most in our descriptions.  We will learn that when we are comparing 2 things, people etc. we use more and when we are comparing more than 2, we use most.  We also leaned when an adjective has 2 or more syllables we generally use more and most instead of er or est.


...

Grade 5
Braille and Beyond
Inventions for the Blind
 is an informational nonfiction book about the different inventions that have helped the blind.  It emphasizes the pioneers of these inventions and how it changed the lives of people who are blind.  The book tells about schools for the blind, famous people who are blind and devices that got invented for the regular public because people wanted to help the blind.  It said that "today someone seems to invent a new way for the blind to see every day."  Ask your children how Louis Braille was influenced by Babier, the soldier and what Charles Dickens did to help the blind.
Phonics skills that we will work on are the suffixes less and ness.  We will work on context clues so we can understand words that are unfamiliar to us.  We will then discuss author's perspective and evaluate what the author was feeling and showing.  We will also review comparing using more and most in front of adjectives in a sentence and writing sentences using the correct form.  (see fourth grade)
    Next week the Terra Nova will be given to children in grades 1-6 and
 MAP tests  will be given to children in grades 3, 4, 5.
All ELL students will take the Communication Arts tests without accommodations unless they just arrived in the US this year.
2009-2010