Reading and Writing News from Mrs. Lambert

In Reading Workshop, we just completed our unit on using a Two Minute Preview to determine what a book, article, or passage is about. In class and at home,  scholars can practice this strategy when reading a new text by looking at the text features (e.g., pictures, the title, back summary, table of contents) to figure out what it’s about, and then explaining which text features they used to figure it out! Scholars have also been practicing vocabulary strategies by determining the meaning of unknown, challenging, or interesting words, using what they know about the word and what the text says as evidence for their thinking.

We are currently practicing previewing texts and reading with questions in mind. Scholars are recording their thinking in the form of questions before they read a text (during a Two Minute Preview), while reading the text, and after having read the text. Asking questions promotes curiosity and interest in learning, and it provides students with a way to monitor their comprehension as they read. Please take the opportunity, while your scholar reads at home, to ask them what questions they had about their reading. Can the answer the questions by rereading or continuing to read? Did the story eventually answer their questions? Are there questions that they still don’t know the answer to?

In Writing Workshop, scholars have been working to focus their stories to have a clear beginning, middle, and end about a narrow topic. Scholars have been using “Freeze Time” in their stories to describe to the reader what they were thinking, sensing, and feeling, and they describe the physical responses to their emotions. Students have revised their personal narrative stories, not just for grammatical and spelling errors, but to improve descriptions that support their main idea and to remove details that do not benefit the main idea of their stories.

Coming up in Reading Workshop, students will begin studying Environmental Engineering and the Design Process that engineers use to problem solve. Scholars will also work with expository texts to determine the central ideas and to locate supporting information. Scholars will learn about believability/credibility as well as how writers organize an essay to have introductions, main ideas, topic sentences, and words or sentences that connect ideas from one paragraph to the next. In Writing Workshop, scholars will be writing expository essays. They will practice maintaining an informative stance, establishing a clear, concise position in the introduction, and providing facts, details, and explanations to support their central idea. When chatting with your child at home, be sure to always encourage them to fully explain their thinking and support their ideas with evidence and reasoning!