David Shannon Author's Study Wrap Up

We are wrapping up our David Shannon author study this week as well as celebrating the start of Mrs. Cushing's FAVORITE time of year:  Baseball Season!!!  Today we read David Shannon's "How Georgie Radbourn Saved Baseball" to commemorate opening day around the major leagues this past weekend.  We discussed how this book was very different in writing and illustrative style than the other David Shannon books we've read.  Students noticed that the mood/tone of the book was very dark and was depicted in the illustrations.  We talked about how authors can set the tone of a story through pictures as well as through words.  After reading the story, we discussed Georgie's character traits and wrote about our discussions during learning centers.

Last week we read "How I Became a Pirate" and talked about how characters change in stories.  We followed that tale up with "Pirates Don't Change Diapers" where we talked about the problem and the solution in the story.  Later this week we will read Too Many Toys, Duck on a Bike, and And The Rain Came Down, which we use to make text-to-text connections with the book Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

Wrapping up our short unit on geometry in math, students will be taking the end-of-unit post test as well as the pre-test for our up-coming unit focusing some more on money.

Students are doing a great job in their reading groups as the texts they read become increasingly more complex.  Please make sure that your child is practicing the books that come home in his/her bag and that he/she is using strategies to decode tricky words.  Students should always be asking themselves if what they are reading looks right and sounds right.  Quite a few students are relying solely on sounding out words and are having trouble with their fluency and comprehension because the words they "sound out" don't make sense in context (i.e. a child reads "wid" for "wide").  If your child does not know a particular word while he/she is reading to you and has tried a couple of strategies (using picture clue, finding known chunks in the word, going back and re-reading to think what would make sense), please don't allow him/her to spend more than about 7 seconds stretching out sounds to decode the word.  You are better off telling your child the word and discussing strategies AFTER he/she is done reading.  This way your child will not lose the sense of the story and comprehension.

This is the last week for our reading log challenge, though students should continue to read for 15-20 minutes minimum each evening.  Right now we are tied for 2nd place (barely)!  Let's go out with a bang, Room 125!!!!  Don't forget those logs on Wednesday and READ, READ, READ!!!!!