Week 26 Announcements

Parents, we only have 4 weeks until the Writing STAAR! With that in mind, our Reading block will only take up about 30-40 minutes of our day while we spend  more than an hour on writing skills and conventions each day. If something interesting happens when you are with your student, please have them write a narrative about it. If you get into an argument, have them try to persuade you using a Funky E expository format.

Writing:

This week, we will focus on words with silent letters, using apostrophes in position and contractions, as well as including I in a list of people (My mother and I). From this week forward, we will be writing two papers per week in class. The first half of this week, we will spend 2 days writing to the expository prompt: If you could have any class pet, what would it be and why. The narrative prompt for this week will be to write about a time when you were surprised.

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

exit	extend	exceed	explosion
explain	exercise	example	exhale
exclude

Reading

At this point in the year, our students have reviewed every major skill for reading. With the exception of a few mini-lessons from time to time, students will be completing spiral review activities, which means they will be asked to discuss and complete assignments on skills from different genres and texts. Two areas we need to improve upon are poetry and drama. Having students reading and interpreting poetry is huge, as well as being able to identify the role that certain characters play in screenplays and scripts. With the time for Reading being lowered each week, please make sure you are continuing to have students read at home.

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.

As always, if you need anything, please do not hesitate to call or text 2145173793