Wednesday, June 10/09

Crash by Paul Kropp

Wow … the last day for us to be all together. We had a busy morning. A couple of you were finishing the Reading Assessment. The rest of us worked on a final review. And , we finshed our class with Crash - a Reader’s Theatre piece based on the Paul Kropp novel. Good job.

I wish you all the best of luck with exams and hope you have a fantastic summer. Start it off with a trip to Indigo to spend your gift card! Get a good book to read this summer. I will see you when you come back for your marks and I hope to see you in Literacy class again in the fall.

Take care …. Mrs. P

Monday, June 8/09

Barefoot …..ahhhhh!!!

It most certainly is getting to feel like barefeet weather! This is our last week of classes. A reminder there is no formal exam but we will do some smaller vocabulary  & comprehension tests.  I hope you will all make an effort to be here each day.

Today we did a vocabulary test from Gates McGinitie. Tomorrow we will do the comprehension piece. This helps us identify our reading level.

We also read a piece of non fiction today called “Barefoot.” We tried to incorporate our reading strategies before, during and after our readng of the article. Good work.

I hope you have a great, barefoot evening!

Friday, June 5/09

Happy Friday!!!  It is a gorgeous day and hopefully the weekend will be the same. Today we started out with independent reading. Next we finished up our vocabulary work from yesterday. And finally, we did our weekly Readers’ Theatre. We did an adaptation of Ironman. It is always helpful when you have seen the movie first which all of you did. That is almost like a pre reading activity … it gets you prepared for the script reading we do in class because you already know the storyline and characters.  

Enjoy your weeken

 

 

 

 

Thursday, June 4/09

The brightly coloured Monarch Butterfly

I did a little more digging on the monarch butterfly after class today. We learned that its defense mechanism (to keep it from being eaten by predators) is the fact that it tastes awful! And its bright colour reminds predators to stay away. The term for this is called aposematism. Very interesting.

We did a lot of things today – a mixture of vocabulary and comprehension work. We finished our book Amazing Animals. In our little class time remaining we will be reviewing all the strategies we have been working on.

Wednesday, June 3/09

Something’s missing … it’s you!!!

It was very quiet today without you all! Most of you were on a field trip and hopefully you had a great day. Tobias and I held down the fort. See you tomorrow.

Tuesday, June 2/09

Elephant sanctuary …

This morning we started with independent reading/journal work. Then, after some technical difficulties, we returned to our book-  Amazing Animals, and finshed our exercise on Determining Importance. I think you are getting the idea of finding the “big idea(s)” in text. You started the short comprehension quiz & will finish it tomorrow.

Monday, June 1/09

Ford’s My Key …

It’s June … can you believe it? We started off today with a “thinkaloud” about Ford’s new technology – MyKey. Not so popular with most of you! We read about and discussed the pros and cons of this technology. I was impressed with your connections and questions. We had a great discussion on this topic. You finished our discussion with an exercise that showed us the difference between first and third person point of view.

Next we did vocabulary work. I gave you a list of words. We did various activities using these words. (word search, words meanings …) Finally I gave you an exercise where some letters were missing fron the list words and you had to provide them. Good work.

Have a great evening … see you tomorrow!

Friday, May 29/09

17 Again …

We started our day with independent reading/journal work. Then, because it is Friday we moved on to Readers’ Theatre. Today we did a script based on the new movie - 17 Again. We had a chance to read through 3 times. And, because we get better with practice we were especially good today … especially that scene where Ned meets his best friend Mike who has amazingly turned back into a 17 year old!! Great work. It was fun. You all have plans for the weekend so enjoy. See you Monday.

Thursday, May 28/09

Baby chameleons … how cute!!

 Who would have thought … an hour delay!! I threw out my hour delay schedule at the end of March!! You just never know.

We are continuing to work on our stratgey of  “determining importance.”  Together we reviewed/worked through the second chapter of our book on animals. We decided on the most important information (main idea) and what  interesting facts supported this. I hope you have a better idea of how this process works.

We ended our class (shortened by the delay) by reviewing straegies to figure out words we don’t know. You had great ideas and were able to decode all the words on our list. Remembering to look for prefixes & suffixes is a good help. Also, breaking words into parts is an excellent strategy.

Reader’s Theatre tomorrow.

Wednesday, May 27/09

Now … that’s a beard!

The man behind the beard … Charles Darwin. We continued reading in the book Amazing Animals. Today we did  Chapter 2 and I asked you to read each section and pick out the main idea. Then you had to find interesting/supporting details. All this helps us to work on the strategy “Determining Importance.” For example, we found out how Darwin did some important work studying animal adaptations. Tomorrow we’ll do Chapter 3.

We also did a bit of vocabulary work – finding the meaning from context in the sentence. Great work there.