Thursday, September 5

Well, I was assessing students on their reading abilities today so there was a substitute. Unfortunately, she didn't leave a good report. She said that the students were loud and talkative... Tomorrow will be a NO TALKING day. If anyone is talking, a behavior reflection will go home. I have a feeling that many of you will be seeing this. Hopefully, this will only happen one time.

In Social Studies, students worked on completing their map skills review. If you are ever traveling, have them help you with directions and reading maps. This will help them greatly connect what we do in the classroom to the real world. In Math, they completed a quick assessment over what we've been learning. I'll be grading these tonight but hopefully, they did well and we can move on next week. They also practiced with addition and subtraction-which we will continue tomorrow. For read aloud, Mrs. Roberts, the substitute, read them Do Unto Otters. This is a play on the golden rule of Do Unto Others... Through forest animals, it showed them the core virtues and playfully helped them to see what the right thing to do is. Then, in Reader's Workshop, they read, worked on a Time For Kids and practiced their fluency with their Reader's Theaters. I noticed that editing is a struggle for most of them so I found some celebrity tweets with bad spelling, capitalization, punctuation and grammar that they had to correct. We have missed word study this week but will be working hard to get caught up next week. Please help your kiddo try to spell words as best they can using the strategies they have learned since Kindergarten. I have been getting a lot of questions on how to spell words. I urge them to at least try and then use their resources before asking an adult.

As for how the class did as a whole on their reading assessment, I only got to about 10 of them. Of those, quite a few had the summer slide and didn't show much progress from last year. Not to worry as most will be able to catch up quickly. I will try to finish the rest tomorrow and next week. I at least have an idea as to where students are and can begin reading groups next week.