November 18

Alliteration

We have been learning to identify alliteration and then use it in our writing. Alliteration is when a beginning sound is used repetitively. (It may or may not be the same letter.) Alliteration is a type of figurative language. We also discovered that alliteration is used in many names and titles.

November 11

Onomatopoeia

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.

November 9

Fact or Opinion

We completed two writing activities to demonstrate our understanding of the difference between facts and opinions. As a class we compiled a list of facts and opinions about fall and displayed our ideas among deciduous trees.

We each chose an animal photo and wrote a fact and an opinion about that animal. I asked the children to demonstrate the knowledge they gained during our animal unit.

September 19

Sentences

We have been learning to identify naming parts (subjects) and telling parts (predicates), so that we know how to write complete sentences. The following two activities helped us understand this concept.

We made sentence flip books. There are six naming parts on one side and six telling parts on the other.  You can flip the pages and make silly sentences.

There are naming parts on one cube and telling parts on the other.  Each child rolls the cubes and combines the naming and telling parts to make complete sentences.

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September 13

Story Maps

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.

September 11

Tweets

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.