This week in reading workshop we talked about what characters are. They can be people, animals, or even things that are given qualities like people. Characters are who the story is about. Characters can change as things happen in the story. We talked about how characters interact and that dialogue helps understand the characters in the the story.
On Tuesday we had a surprise assembly to celebrate Mrs. Bonacquist's birthday! Earlier we had created a page in an alphabet book that was presented at the assembly. Two children from our class read the page and presented Mrs. Bonacquist with a flower.
This week in writing workshop we continued to write true stories. We talked about what makes writing hard to read, and what makes writing easy to read. The children had to assess their own writing and divide it into two piles-easy to read, and hard to read. We talked about revising and ways to make our writing better. We practiced writing stories that readers really want to read by remembering and using everything we have learned so far about writing. We talked about how writers think about what they want to say before writing anything down. The children rehearsed their writing with their writing partners before beginning a new piece. We ended the week with the children reviewing their most recent piece of writing and whether it was hard to read or easy to read. We also began our use of conventions such as a capital at the beginning of a sentence and a period at the end.
In math we practiced making groups of 5,6,7, and 8, then writing addition sentences to describe the groups we made. We talked about comparing numbers to 10. We practiced making groups on a ten frame using the terms one more, one fewer, and two more. We practiced quantity recognition within a ten frame by playing a game called ten frame flash. The ten frame flashes a group on a ten frame and the children need to say the quantity before it changes. I have included a link to "Ten Frame Flash" on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRR9LK3zfho
