Ask me about tuesday, february 16, 2021

We continued to work with short e today in our Orton Gillingham work.  Short e is a difficult sound for many students.  The motion we make for this sound is to put our thumb and pointer finger together and spread them apart in front of our lips.  We also worked with the red word get.

In Benchmark, we re-read an information book called What Do Animals Need?  This book tells what animals need to survive and why.  The first time we read it, we focused on the things they need.  The book clearly shows and tells what animals need in photographs, headings, and in the text.  Today, we focused on a little more challenging task, and that was to find out the reason they need these things to survive.

We also read an information book about elephants.  This book is a fun book to read because if read at home with a family member, there is a parent for an adult, and a part of a child to read.  Some of our friends could read both parts, so I was able to have a lot of help reading this book!  I assigned it in Epic, but you will need to read it just before school, after school, or Wednesday afternoon since Epic is only available for free during school hours.  We read a few chapters from the book, but not all.  The book is called National Geographic Readers: Elephants, and it is a You Read, I Read book.  If you like this book and enjoy reading with your child in that format, you might look for other books that National Geographic has that are the same format.  Ask me to show your my Doodle Notebook so I can show you what I learned about elephants today!

We continued to work with number bonds.  We used our two-sided chips to shake and spill to find different ways to show 7.

We will be reading this book again and probably a third time, but I wanted to share a truly exceptional book with you.  It's called Milo Imagines the World, by Matt de la Pena.  There are several great life lessons in this book, and it's a book that needs to be read many times at different times in children's lives.  This is definitely one for the family bookshelf.  I'm attaching a video of the author reading the story, but this is a book to snuggle up together and read, stopping to talk along the way the second, and subsequent times you read it.  Today, we really just took in the plot of what was happening in the story.  We will dive in a little deeper the next time we read it and talk more about what Milo was imagining and why.  It was great to see Milo doodling about the world around him, and what he was imagining, and how what he imagined wasn't necessarily reality.  I can't say enough about this book!   

We will be taking a Benchmark test tomorrow.  The children should be able to log on by themselves, and will be able to take the test on their own.  Our reading specialist, Mrs. Abramson, will be helping out.  Hopefully then, we can't move on with learning and not so much testing!

Have a great evening!
​Miss Wolfe