This week in reading workshop we continued our study of non-fiction books.  We focused on the illustrator/photographer's role.  The illustrator/photographer chooses pictures to help us learn something new.  The photograph can show what something actually looks like and helps us understand more of what the author is saying.  A non-fiction illustrator uses features that make a book more interesting and exciting to read.  They use photographs, diagrams, drawings, and cutaways.  We also talked about how the author and illustrator work together to create a non-fiction book.

In writing we continued writing how-to books. We talked about all that we have learned so far about writing how-to books and reviewed everything we know about what makes writing easy to read: it's neat, has finger spaces between words, letters for the sounds in words, capital at the beginning and period at the end of a sentence.  It's sometimes easy to forget since they are focused on a new type of writing.  We also discussed learning from mentor how-to books things like: A title that tells what the book is about, creating pictures that teach, making a list of things you will need, using bold writing to stress the important parts.

In math we talked about ways to problem solve such as using counters or objects.  We practiced our subtraction facts through five with the bean and spinner game, and we discussed different ways to make 4 or 5 with two groups.  When I introduced the fact that you can have the sum first, then the addends, the children were baffled.  I compared it to a balance scale, and how it doesn't matter which side you put the sum or addends in as long as it is balanced.  We practiced several examples, but this concept will take more practice.

Morning work finding sums