Mrs. Economou's Weekly Newsletter
Important dates:
Sept. 18th - Sports Page Spirit Day
Sept. 22nd - Fit, Fun Assembly
Sept. 26th - no school
Oct. 2nd - Curriculum Night
Current topics of learning:
Math: Addition & subtraction, with & with
out regrouping, & addition & subtraction
with & without regrouping after rounding.
Science: Point of reference, speed,
acceleration, inertia, etc.
Social Studies: We are learning about
where the population of NC lives.
Reading: We continue to revisit
character analysis. (Check out your
child's journal to see our bubble map of
adjectives describing Count Olaf from
our read aloud this week, The Reptile
Room.) We are currently learning about
the author's purpose: entertain,
persuade, express or inform. We have
looked at newspaper articles,
advertisements, opinion pieces and
informative columns to deepen our
understanding of author's purpose.
Explanation of ELA
ELA includes spelling. The students
took a pretest to discern what their gaps
were, and were grouped accordingly
into 6 groups. Every Thursday the
students receive their new words, I go
over the spelling rule(s) with them, help
to sort the words, and they copy the sort
into their notebook. (Most kids are using
the back of their journal.) Throughout
the week, the children must resort and
study their words that they keep in a
plastic bag. I recommend on Tuesday
night, they take a pretest to figure out
which words they still need to study. I
am not going to assign homework
because some kids learn the words the
day I explain the sort and the spelling
pattern, while others need to write them
over and over again to learn them. You
know your child better than anyone, so
please discuss with him/her how he/she
plans to learn the words. If I see children
consistently struggling on spelling tests,
I will have to assign daily homework so
that they can learn the words.
We focus on writing, too. Writing is
done on Daily Practice Pages. These
skills pages are handed out during ELA
and it is the student's responsibility to
hand them in by the week's end. Some
children are pokey and may need to
take them home Thursday night to finish
them. We write daily in our journals. We
write when we do projects and current
events. We write in our social studies
books, and in our notebooks when we
take notes. Public speaking is also a
component of ELA, & thus the projects
are assigned to give the students an
opportunity to address their peers.
Since reading is our main focus, I want
to describe a bit of what we do in our
class. I read to the students so that
they hear words that may be too difficult
for them to read on their own and then
we discuss the text so that they have full
comprehension. We use phrases such
as, "When the text said ___, I was
thinking ___, because _____." I read
aloud because modeling fluent reading
allows students to notice how to pause
at commas, emphasize certain words,
pronounce difficult words, etc. I model
how my brain works when reading. The
students read to themselves on
several reading levels every week. Their
weekly story in Reading Street is written
on grade level. It is a 4th grade book.
Nearly every week, the students read a
book called a leveled reader. These
books correlate with the weekly story,
and build on the vocabulary introduced
in the weekly story. There are green,
yellow and blue leveled readers. Your
child knows which color is theirs, and it
was based on their baseline score. At
any time, if a child is having great
success with their book, and finds it too
easy, he can move to a higher color.
Basically, these books are on the levels
of 3rd, 4th and 5th grades. Every child
should be reading a book at home every
night. This book is picked by them.
PICK= P-purpose...why do I want to
read this book. I-interest...does it
interest me. C-comprehension...do I
understand. K-know...do I know most of
the words? I've told the children, you
want a book that has a new word or two
per page. Anymore than that is too
frustrating. Anything less than that isn't
challenging enough. We have three
novel groups in our class, and during
guided reading time, the students take
turns reading the novel aloud to their
group. Afterwards, they are assigned
roles for their group. One person might
be the passage picker who needs to find
an important passage in the novel and
explain why it is important. Is it because
it was the funniest, the scariest, the
most important event to move the plot
forward, etc. One person might be the
word wizard, which means they look up
the difficult words for the group, or a
student summarizer, text connector, or
another job. After they do their jobs,
they meet back and share out what they
have done. The discussion director has
questions to guide their time together.
Their social studies book and science
book are also written on grade level, but
seem to be more difficult because many
children don't have the background info
that would make the words seem easier.
Today, for instance, we had to discuss
the words urban, suburban and rural in
order to understand the point of the
chapter on regions of NC. We have had
to go over the difference between cities,
states, and countries before we could
proceed with our reading. Also written
on a 4th grade level are their math word
problems and health books. I also
challenge the students to read above
their level when I ask them to read a
newspaper article to do a current events
report. Nearly all the students would
need to read the article several times,
with a dictionary in hand, or an adult to
explain words and ideas, before they
would get the full meaning. Children
who are below grade level in
reading, or borderline, will also start
reading "fresh reads" next week. That is
when the child is timed reading a
paragraph she has never seen before.
This quick activity has shown to help
students increase their reading speed,
and with increased speed usually comes
increased comprehension. They will
also do fluency reads a few times a
week. This entails reading a few
paragraphs over and over, developing
fluency with that particular grade level
passage. The students love beating
their time over and over again. It helps
them learn to group prepositional
phrases when reading (in the meadow,
under the fence, through the valley) &
other good reading strategies. NEXT
WEEK I WILL EXPLAIN HOW OUR
MATH CLASS IS ORGANIZED.