Week 25 Announcements (February 16-20)

Parents, students have worked very hard the last two weeks and taken three very important benchmarks. We only have 5 weeks until the Writing STAAR, which is on March 31st. Having your students writing at home for practice is extremely important.

Writing:

For the past 9 weeks, students have been practicing writing their expository writing. I am very proud of the amount of progress I’ve seen in those 9 weeks. This week, we will review how to write narratives. From this point forward, we will switch back and forth between narrative writing and expository writing, week by week. Students will be asked to write about a time when someone told them they did a good job!

Sight Words

Please remember that the sight words for the rest of the year will contain either prefixes or suffixes. This week, students will have sight words with the prefix: un- (which means not). To push your students even further, ask them to identify the ROOT word in the sentence.

Instructions: Please complete the following tasks with each sight word:

• write five times each
• write using stairstep spelling
• write each word in a sentence
• provide the meaning or definition for the word

unable	unused	unusual	unfriendly
unacceptable	unfair	unattractive	unbalanced
unaware	unfamiliar	unexpected	unlocked

Reading

This week in reading, students will be focusing on Main Idea in fiction. In order to figure out the main idea of a passage, students are asked to think about the conflicts in a story and how the main characters deal with those conflicts. It is important for students to understand why an event is important to the story as a whole.

Reading Logs

Parents, please make sure that you are checking students’ reading logs. Writing summaries of reading passages is a skill tested on STAAR. Students should write ONLY 4-5 sentences of what they’ve read, including the following important parts: a beginning, middle, end, conflict, and solution (if there is one). Students should only be writing a few sentences. The skill of summarizing is meant to recap what has happened while highlighting only the most important parts.