Gr 1 Week of 11/24 How-to’s and Reading!

Writing: How-to Books

This week we have been working on publishing our Personal Narratives and have begun our new unit on writing How-to Books.  In this unit students will explore how procedural texts work and will write their own.  This week we started exploring what these books are like.  Here is a chart created by the noticings students in 101 had:

One of the biggest challenges of this unit is generating topics.  In order to help your child be successful in this unit we will send home a sheet where you can help them brainstorm a list of things they are experts in and know How-to do.  For example, how to make pancakes, how to play Connect Four or how to do a handstand.  They can bring this paper back to school and keep it in their writing folder for reference.
Readers Workshop

In Reader’s workshop we finished working on word solving strategies. This will be reinforced in small groups and one to one reading conferences. While reading with partners students were asked to retell the story.  Depending on the length of the book, some children retold once they finished reading others stopped after a few pages and worked on retelling.

Retelling helps readers recall what is happening in the story, develop a sense of story structure, and become more accurate in monitoring their understanding.  This is something you can continue working on at home.  When they are retelling be sure they include the characters, setting, problems, and solution or the main ideas of the text.  Students should only be telling you the important parts of the text, not every single detail. Using sequencing words (first, next, then, after that, finally) will help them.

Below is a picture or the word-solving strategies we learned.  You can use it as a reference when reading with your child.

Pajama Day

Pajama Day was a HUGE Success here are some pictures!

Hope you all enjoy the holiday weekend with your loved ones!

Please don’t forget to bring in an apple for our thanksgiving day craft on Wednesday!