Today, Malik and I worked on how to decode and sound out parts of a word in order to read the whole word without pausing in between sounds. We also practiced noticing the same prefixes and suffixes in words to help sound them out, as well as to understand the meaning of the word. We played fun fluency games for little "brain breaks" in between the lesson. The game consists of reading a series of phrases while being timed. Then, you read the same phrases again and try to beat your previous time. Malik seemed to really enjoy this activity. He is working hard every session, and seems to truly want to reach his reading goal.

Spelling quiz. Read for understanding chapter 6 in "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nymh." Predict what happened to the rats at the lab Nymh.

Today, Malik and I worked on decoding skills, phonics, and phonemic awareness. We also discussed understanding suffixes and how it changes the tense of a word. Such as, "think", "thinks", "thinking". We ended our time with discussing our prior lesson on certain strategies to use while answering comprehension questions. Malik worked very hard!

Today, Malik and I did a few "ice-breaker" activities in order to get to know one another. We played reading games, and then dove directly into reading a non-fiction passage, followed by comprehension questions. Malik is a hard worker and was trying his best throughout the entire lesson.

Yanuell wanted to begin our session where we had left off yesterday by writing each other messages in the Skype text box without speaking. We continued telling each other jokes and riddles trying to get the other to laugh out loud and break the silence. Yanuell did an excellent job creating his own jokes and riddles. Several times he took a break from writing to add his new jokes to the Pages document he created yesterday. The riddle from today that Yanuell was most proud of was: what do you call a tiger that swims? Answer: A tiger shark. During the activity, we were able to work on writing, punctuation, phonics, and spelling. One of the jokes that we found today focused on the word racecar which is a palindrome. Of course with Yanuell, it immediately became a teachable moment. He learned about what a palindrome is and several examples of them. After the writing activity, Yanuell wanted to transition to the Storyline Online website to listen to a few books. He commented that he hadn't been to this website in a long time and was excited to listen to one of our most favorite books ever, Library Lion. While on the site, Yanuell looked at the new titles that had been added since we last logged on as well as listening to Library Lion, Catching the Moon, and Clark the Shark. We discussed the main idea and theme of the books as well as the importance of illustrations in picture books. To end his language arts session, Yanuell began reading an article on the Newsela website called, Animals Atlas: Africa. During the reading we discussed vocabulary words and context clues. Yanuell will finish reading this article on Monday.

Marcos completed a Daily Edit in which he located and corrected grammatical errors. He read the second chapter in "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats or NYMH". We wrote a character analysis.

Marcos read chapter 1. We discussed the first theme of the book, family. Marcos listed the human traits of the rats and compared them to the rat-like traits. We did a power point on capital letters from chompchomp.com. Marcos completed an assessment on capitalization. He practiced writing his name in cursive and worked on home row keys on keyborading.

Marcos and I interviewed one another. We each wrote a paragraph with the information. I assessed grammar and writing levels from the paragraph. Marcos chose "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nymh" as his first novel. I introduced Marcos to chompchomp.com. We are going to use the website as a source for grammar instruction.

Yanuell worked on his Stanford Standardized testing today.

Yanuell worked on the Stanford standardized testing today.