We recently finished our unit on narrative writing and now our new unit is underway! The children began learning about opinion writing. (As they get older, this will branch out into persuasive writing.) I used the books I Wanna Iguana and I Wanna New Room to introduce children to the idea of writing a letter about something you have a strong feeling about. I have been modeling writing letters to the students about things I have an opinion of (such as books, my favorite weather, a season I like, etc.). Then, we made a list of topics that we might have an opinion of. The students are working on writing letters to many different people expressing their opinions! They are working on including these 5 main things:
- A greeting
- State their opinion
- Tell why
- A closing
- A picture that ILLUSTRATES their reason why
The students learned about a decoding strategy they can use to figure out unknown words: push through each sound in the word. Please note that in reading, it is better to use the language "push though the sounds" rather than "sound it out," which is why we have Stretchy Snake help us! "Sound it out" is actually implying break apart a word sound by sound (e.g. cat > c-a-t, fish > f-i-sh), and this is what the children do in WRITING. In reading the children should try to say each sound slowly and push/BLEND the sounds together so they can hear what the word is. It is common for children to recognize the word just by blending the beginning sounds together- and this is a good thing! With context clues, our brains will probably be able to guess what the word is with just a few sounds as additional clues.
Similarly, the children learned that good readers have to ask themselves if the word LOOKS RIGHT AT THE END. I am encouraging children to check the ending and ask themselves, "Does it look right?" We practiced this with one book in particular when it read "everyone's." The children had to look at the END of the word to figure out if it said "everyone's" or "everybody's."
The children have been learning a lot about sorting. They have sorted many different shapes and objects into different categories. Right now, we are working on sorting by the same category in a way that doesn't allow an object to be in two different categories like a Venn Diagram shows.