Learning to Edit and Revise

What a beautiful week back we had!  The children loved having the option of playing outside without snow pants (although many children decided to still to wear their snow pants).  What a great sign of the weather to come!

This week during Writing Workshop, we chose one of our how-to books to edit.  Each day, we went through a different step on an editing checklist.  The children edited their books for finger spaces, capital letters at the beginning of each sentence, punctuation, correct spelling of popcorn words, and lower case letters where they belong.  They also learned about revising.  The children revised their chosen books to see if they could add more information, like a what you will need page or a warning.  On Friday, we began rewriting these edited/revised books.  We will finish this process next week, then the children will share their published posters.  We will kick-off our new writing unit, All-About Books, the middle of next week.

During Reading Workshop, we worked on retelling stories.  We made retelling bracelets with beads that remind us to retell the characters, setting, beginning, middle, and end of each story we read.  We also spent time learning more about nonfiction.  I taught the children about bold words and a glossary.  We also learned that when we don't know the meaning of a word in a nonfiction text, we can use our prior knowledge and the pictures to help us think about what the word could mean.

During Math we:

• learned about tally marks.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• learned about the following 3-dimensional objects: cones, cubes, cylinders, spheres, and rectangular prisms.  We compared and contrasted these objects to 2-dimensional shapes.
• used ribbon to measure our heights then used the ribbon to measure objects in the classroom.  Through this lesson, we talked about longer than, shorter than, and about the same length.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

We also participated in our Science light lab this week.  The children rotated through five different experiments during which they made predictions and tested those predictions to answer five questions:

• Is light made of many colors?
• Can we make light bend (refraction)?
• Can light bounce off objects (reflection)?
• Is light needed to see an object?
• Can light travel through objects?

 

 

This was a fun morning with a great deal of learning.  Ask your child to tell you about what he/she learned.   

Have a great weekend!

Katie