This morning we began with chapter 3, "Across the Bridge" in our Magic Tree House book, The Knight at Dawn. We discussed what Gracyn felt the word knight means. We also focused quite a bit on context clues today. For example, in our story we discussed the meaning of the statement, "A piercing shriek split the air." We discussed reading on to see if more information can help us with the meaning. The next statement read, "It sounded like it came from that house over there!" We talked about how this sentence used the word "sounded", so that may help us know that a shriek is some type of sound. We then completed our follow up questions for chapter three and worked on writing our responses in complete sentences. Gracyn demonstrated great recall of our reading as she responded to all the questions correctly. Next, it was Gracyn's turn to read! She read the first portion of a fiction story entitled, Splat the Cat: Blow, Snow, Blow by Rob Scotton. This book provides for good practice of reading tricky blends and clusters (two and three consonants together in words). We practiced using context clues again in this book, for example with the word "stared". Gracyn couldn't sound it out, so I instructed her to skip the word and read the whole sentence. This helped Gracyn generate the appropriate synonym "looked" to fill in the blank. We then worked on chunking “stared” into parts to sound it out.