I will occasionally share literary terms that we are learning. We spent time on alliteration and now we’ll be watching for onomatopoeia. The children love these power words and I hope you’ll be able to reinforce the concepts at home when you read together. Onomatopoeia is the use of sound words in writing. I will also encourage the children to use onomatopoeia in their own writing.

We are learning that authors write for different purposes. It’s as easy as P.I.E! Authors write to persuade, inform, and entertain. We tried to think of ways to persuade others to pick our jack-o-lanterns form the patch. Which one would you pick?

September Tube Book Reports

The children continue to increase their vocabulary by learning synonyms. We’ve also used the thesaurus to find exciting words for overused words like said, nice, walk, and good.

We have learned four of the components of a story:
Characters
Setting (where and when)
Problem (conflict)
Resolution

We discussed various types of conflicts – between characters, within a character (a decision or illness), or with nature (storm, fire, or flood). We learned that it may take several steps to resolve a problem and that some problems are not resolved. Some books have one problem that the characters try to solve the entire story and others have a different problem in each chapter. When your child reads at home, see if he/she can identify these components. Sometimes they have to look for clues to decide when a story happens. For example: Is it snowing? Are the characters talking about a holiday? What kind of technology is used?

In this project, we created a character and then placed it in a setting. Then we had to create a problem for the character and a way that the character might resolve it.

The children always have news and stories to share. Sometimes it’s difficult to listen to everyone’s stories every day, so I wanted a way in which they could share their news. I’m also always looking for ways to incorporate more reading and writing. The answer was a tweet board. The children may write news on the tweet board several times each week. Their special area teachers and past teachers have really enjoyed reading the tweets too! This was our first day of tweets last week.