Interviews and Summarizing!

Thank you to everyone who had time to come down to interviews this week! It was great to touch base with everyone and let you know the inner workings of our classroom and discuss goals!

This week we have been working with Summarizing; I can find, organize and retell important facts or story elements from the text. To introduce this strategy, we had a couple students come up and talk for 2 whole minutes about an activity they had done over the weekend. Then, turning to the class, one student had to retell their classmates story in 3 sentences. Using our Determining Importance strategy, we were able to figure out what the important parts were and highlight them.


To summarize a story, I read the students a personal favourite - "Mom, Can I Have a Stegasaurus, Can I Please?". Once we read this story we discussed the format of retelling using, "Somebody...Wanted...But...So...Then...". This helps us remember the story elements and provides us with the language for retelling orally and sentence starters when writing. We can use this to summarize the end of a chapter as well, to review what has happened.

To practice this skill, students worked in small groups to read books and summarize them first orally and then into a graphic organizer.

 
 

We have also spent some time talking about complete sentences and how they need both a subject and predicate. The subject is the WHO or WHAT the sentence is about and the predicate is WHAT the subject is doing. Predicates will usually contain the action and uses verbs.

Using visuals, we had one student pick a subject and a second decide what that subject is doing. When we listen to just one students our sentence is not complete and doesn't make sense (i.e. A small blue bird) and they need their fellow students with the action(i.e. is eating raw pumpkin seeds) to complete  them so they may be pronounced "Sentence". Students went on to create their own sentences and identify the simple(bird; eating) and complete(A blue bird; eating raw pumpkin seeds)subject and predicates.

In Math, we worked on review in patterns and then completed our patterns test! Every did a pretty good job and I will be going over them with the class Monday and sending them home to be signed and with corrections.

In Social, we introduced the Alberta Regions project the students will be completing in groups for this unit. Each group will be responsible for creating their own slideshow about their region and teaching it to the class. We are continuing to work through our reading and chapters as a class.

We also had some time to make some pretty and SPOOKY art! Students worked with tempura paint and added white to tint their base colour and create a beautiful back drop for a haunted house!

This afternoon they will take some times writing FOR SALE ads for their spooky houses!