Read and Write 180-Day 19

Wednesday, September 8, 2011

We are halfway finished with this week! Can I hear a “Oh, yeah”???? 🙂

We REALLY spent a lot of time on English today. Actually, we spent too much time. I have got to get a grip on this since “most” of our time NEEDS to be spent on reading. English has just been declared a foreign subject in my classroom 🙂 It.is.so.hard.for.them.

This week we are working with types of sentences (they are doing pretty good at this), subjects, and predicates. I don’t have 2 hours to really explain how this is going with the subjects and predicates-let’s just say that they are having a hard time!

They had to label a sentence when they first came in the room today-then we went over it. THEN we practiced about 2 more sentences on the board. THEN I had them work in groups to create their own sentence and label it. THEN I put EACH sentence on the board and we went over them. THEN I had to move on to something other than  English! 🙂 I can’t remember the sentences from today, but I am going to make up one for you:

The ball rolled off the desk.

Simple subject-ball

Simple predicate (predicate is the verb)-rolled

Complete subject-The ball

Complete predicate-rolled off the desk

Parts of speech-The/article     ball/noun     rolled/verb     off/preposition     the/article     desk/noun

I am glad that I have ALL year to teach this because it’s going to take us ALL year! Last year I used the English workbook and tried to throw in a few other activities as we went along. None of that worked for the most part so I decided to do something different this year. Right now I am “introducing/teaching” ALL english concepts/skills that we will be learning this year. When we get finished with this, we will work with 1 sentence each week all week long. We will do something different with this sentence each day. This will be our Daily Grammar Practice. I will also be teaching mini-lessons on the things that we covered this 1st 6 weeks. Maybe this method will stick. I hope so. 🙂

We played charades with our word study words. They worked with a partner-I assigned each partnership a word. They had to figure out how to act it out so the rest of the class could guess it. They had a good time. So did I. Finally! I love words, and I just want them to notice (if not love) words and have ownership of them and be able to use them.

We partner read our passage “Spitting to Survive” and practiced the “Say Something” strategy. This is where one partner would read a section to the other one. Then the other student would tell them about what they just read. They said that this helps them instead of just reading it silently. I explained to them that they can use this strategy by themselves when they read to check their own understanding. I want the kids to be able to KNOW when they don’t understand what they are reading and be able to DO something about it. This shows independence/thinking/self-monitoring.

I introduced the synthesizing strategy to them. Synthesizing is mainly just “figuring it out” when they read. It’s changing their thinking about things as they read to be able to understand. I told them that this strategy is not really one they can “practice”-it is what they will end up doing after practicing and getting good at all the other comprehension strategies.

Then they got to do Read to Self and Work on Writing. I pulled a few students to talk to them about their reading records, listened to them read from their independent book, and talked about where they are breaking down in their reading. Above all, I want them to have self-awareness of what they struggle with and what they can work towards. We will set our independent reading goals in a couple of more weeks. I LOVE working individually with the kids and can’t wait to be able to fully implement this part of my instruction!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, now that I have managed to write a college essay on our day I will go so I can read some of their reading response letters. Keep your fingers crossed that they will show some deep thinking! 🙂