We continued to gather material for the board game. We have progressed through 11 weeks of Studies Weekly and have learned about the Native peoples and the colonizers from Spain, France, and Britain and their battles for dominance.
The session began with practice using partial products multiplication and reading large numbers. Samantha reviewed subtraction, addition and multiplication facts. She played a game of multiplication mental math. Division facts were discussed and practiced. Several word problems were read and solved orally by Samantha. The session ended with practicing division of basic facts.
design fundamentals. using "complementary" colors Samantha finished her peacock painting today. She is also working on creating a pillow with her own design as part of our three-d art forms.
Sam started class by quickly printing a visual for today's writing assignment. She chose to write a paragraph about Something Rotten. Using the same graphic organizer we have been working with that lists topic sentence/hook, detail 1 related to topic, detail 2 related to topic, detail 3 related to topic, then conclusion/wrap-up sentence. This is the same format we use for essays, but at this point she is mastering a descriptive paragraph with varied sentence types. Sam created a rough draft paragraph in the graphic organizer and revised as she typed, there is a visible difference in the quality of her writing since Christmas break.
The lesson was to begin with a review of partial products multiplication and reading large numbers. Division using compatible numbers was to be discussed and practiced.
Sam started class with build-a-sentence practice, using "Taylor sang" as a starting point. We then revisited the structure of a paragraph and pre-write that is used to help with writing. Next, Sam created a pre-write for a Taylor Swift paragraph. She checked her sentences against the rubric for a paragraph and switched/added a few things to boost up the level. She will practice this routine and then the onset of writing becomes quick and second nature. She had just started typing the final draft when class ended. Sam did a lovely job today and was not feeling up to par, great job, Sam!
Sam completed reading Thea Stilton stopping frequently to check comprehension, detection of figurative language, context clues and how they are used, compare and contrast the characters with Greek mythological characters, and vocabulary and word usage: new words such as glum, intricate, labyrinth, abyss, and intuition. Intuition was the only new word for Sam to take in out of the list, her vocabulary level is above grade level. We then discussed again the difference between an instructional level for a novel and an independent level (Thea Stilton). Next, she pretested on 5th grade Vocabulary Workshop and scored 10/12. We will choose a list later in the book for pretest and further study.
Today Samantha reviewed both real and nonsense words from both step 2.4 and 2.5. Several words were created with the magnetic tiles for her to read. She had no difficultly reading them. She charted both real and nonsense words from both of these steps and did a great job. For the written portion of the lesson Samantha experienced more difficulty. She spelled 4/8 real words and 4/4 nonsense words correctly. The real words she misspelled (shimp for shrimp, slit for split, sleepted for slept, and scub for scrub) were corrected upon completion of the written portion. She self-corrected when shown the words with the exception of slept. Samantha spelled the three dictated sight words correctly. She also had some difficulty with the sentence dictation part of the lesson. After the written part of the lesson Samantha practiced fluency. She read some word lists and then a passage using step two words. It is planned to post test Samantha on step 2 after a review of the concepts in this step. We will continue to work on spelling.
