Today was a Delayed Start Wednesday. We had a professional development meeting this morning with our facilitator, Annemarie Johnson. Our topic was writing instruction for our students. Here are a few things I thought you might be interested in learning about...
Did you know that there are four Common Core English Language Arts Strands? They are reading, writing, speaking/listening, and language.
Did you know that each year your child is working with three main text types? They are opinion/argument, informative/explanatory, and narrative. Beginning with kindergarten your child will begin a progression of learning that advances each year as they move toward 5th grade at Bailey Lake.
We began third grade with writing personal narratives. The purpose was to tell a story/convey an experience. The structure of this type of writing has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The timeline pulls you through the story. In third grade our students establish a situation and introduce characters/narrator while organizing events in a sequence. Third graders add details such as actions, thoughts, feelings, dialogue. In our writing we use temporal words to signal a sequence in the story such as "all of a sudden". Our stories end with a sense of closure.
Reading: New unit called Mixed Genre Series Book Clubs.
Today we discussed what book clubs are and the purpose. We will be working with books in a series. The class made a list of common series books that are familiar to third graders. To begin noticing that characters act in patterns we viewed 3 video clips in the series called "Simon's Cat". We noticed that the patterns in the cats behavior, actions and interactions help us to learn more about the character, the cat.
Another focus of this activity was identifying character traits of the cat with evidence so that each student could meet with a partner to discuss his or her findings and share evidence to support his/her thinking. This is very important as our third graders begin reading for book clubs. We need to share our thoughts and provide evidence from our stories to help bring a rich discussion about our books. Here are posters that have a record of our reading thoughts today.
Did you know that there are four Common Core English Language Arts Strands? They are reading, writing, speaking/listening, and language.
Did you know that each year your child is working with three main text types? They are opinion/argument, informative/explanatory, and narrative. Beginning with kindergarten your child will begin a progression of learning that advances each year as they move toward 5th grade at Bailey Lake.
We began third grade with writing personal narratives. The purpose was to tell a story/convey an experience. The structure of this type of writing has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The timeline pulls you through the story. In third grade our students establish a situation and introduce characters/narrator while organizing events in a sequence. Third graders add details such as actions, thoughts, feelings, dialogue. In our writing we use temporal words to signal a sequence in the story such as "all of a sudden". Our stories end with a sense of closure.
Reading: New unit called Mixed Genre Series Book Clubs.
Today we discussed what book clubs are and the purpose. We will be working with books in a series. The class made a list of common series books that are familiar to third graders. To begin noticing that characters act in patterns we viewed 3 video clips in the series called "Simon's Cat". We noticed that the patterns in the cats behavior, actions and interactions help us to learn more about the character, the cat.
Another focus of this activity was identifying character traits of the cat with evidence so that each student could meet with a partner to discuss his or her findings and share evidence to support his/her thinking. This is very important as our third graders begin reading for book clubs. We need to share our thoughts and provide evidence from our stories to help bring a rich discussion about our books. Here are posters that have a record of our reading thoughts today.