The Can Do Kids have been learning new Reading Stragegies each day in class!  Our main focus has been that READING is THINKING! and Comprehension in UNDERSTANDING!  We have wonderful readers in our 3rd grade class…our job is to make sure that they understand what they read 🙂 Here are the Can Do Kids singing “Schema Schema”!

Don’t forget to ask your child what SCHEMA means!!!!

Happy Reading!

This is one of my favorite books to start the school year off!  Not only do I love the illustrations, but I love thinking of the character in the story!  Day 2 of school and I am trying to teach love of reading to my sweet class!  I always model to them how important books are to me and how they are dear to my heart!  Every book is my favorite book!  In this text, I love how the character has a wild imagination with great describing words.  It really is a beautiful book!   This book is about how everyone needs a QUIET PlACE sometimes- rather to just think or to read…so after we read it we TURNed and TaLked about where OUR QuiEt PlaCe would be!  The discussions were so vivid!  I loved it!  Then we concluded with the question….Where Do GOOD Readers READ???  and this is what our FABULOUS students came up with! (check out our class comments)

I am so proud of the Can Do Kids!   They had a blast doing this mini research project and did so well on their Paragraph writing!   Super Job kids!  

This is the writing program we use that focuses on making the writing process simple and easy to remember. Students will become familiar with the 3 main steps in writing by relating them to colors– green, yellow and red. At each grade level, students master skills of increasing length and complexity. This week we are writing about an Endangered Animal of our choice.   We first went to this website to get information and facts about some Endangered Species from around the world. http://www.kidsplanet.org/factsheets/map.html Next, we took the information and practiced writing a paragraph using the above steps. We will post them soon 🙂

In class, we are reading a Mystery book, about Detective Camp.   While we are reading it, we are also learning the PARTS and JobS  of a Literature Circle.   So, far we have discussed the responsiblity of the “Predictor” “Connector” and “Inferrer”.   We are stressing the importance of “Stopping and Thinking” while reading.   It is very easy for the kids to get reading so fluently that they do not remember what they reading, especially while reading chapter books! Ask your son or daughter what the job descriptions are of the above jobs!   I am so proud of them!

We had a quick review of Homophones and Contractions this week! Here  are a couple fun quizzes you can practice at home to review homophones and contractions 🙂 HOMOPHONE QUIZ CONTRACTION QUIZ

Good readers INFER while they read to figure out what happens next, it is a smart guess that they make using clues from the story and their SCHEMA to figure out the answer~   You can also INFER the meaning of a word.   This happens to all of us, when we are reading a chapter book or an informational book we come to a word that we do not know the meaning of…what do we do?   Hopefully we do not skip the word, we INFER what it means… When we do that we use our schema, look at the pictures if there are any, we reread the sentence and look for clues in the text.   After doing those things, we should then come up with a good answer to the meaning of the word.   We have been using these strategies in class this week! Example:   We read the book:   and Inferred some Hawaii’n words that were in the text! The kids had a blast!   We also read,       and we all inferred a new ending to the story!   I had the children leave a comment for you to read!