Posted by kavery508 | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on November 12, 2018
Rotary Readers are coming! In an effort to promote literacy across the town, Members of the Shrewsbury Rotary Club will visit Tuesday and read to second graders using engaging picture books that they donate to each classroom’s library! We’re grateful for the organization’s good works.
Our CAFE focus this week is on summarizing by analyzing a character’s feelings. Reading is comprehending, and understanding the feelings of a main character helps us identify his/her motivation and reactions. We look to these as clues to determining the important parts in the story. Students will learn to summarize with familiar read alouds and to apply it in their independent reading.
Our work with bar modeling is paying off! Students are becoming adept at relating them to parts-and-total problems, using them to make sense of problems, and understanding numbers involved by drawing them bars with appropriate scale. This week we are learning to use bar models to make sense of comparison problems. The model looks different from before because our thinking about solving the problem should be different. For example, consider this problem:
Notice how setting up the model this way shows understanding of what “more than” means. Using our knowledge of the parts-and-total bar model previously taught, it makes it easy for kids to see that what is required to solve this problem is addition.
The same can be said of using modeling to make sense of “less than” problems:
Students who set up the problem correctly can immediately see that Susan’s amount is smaller than Rosa’s, and that subtraction is called for to solve it. Like a parts-and-total frame, we subtract the part (157) from the total (824) to get the remaining part. See how helpful a tool bar modeling is?
At Friday’s School Meeting, students engaged with the ideas of inclusion, assertion, and kindness using the book The Invisible Boy (Ludwig, 2013). The book tells of a boy who feels unnoticed by his peers until someone comes along who includes him in his work and play. Our students shared their experiences and generated possible solutions for the boy and his classmates, developing their understanding of empathy. Here’s a version of it read aloud (Sami & Amro Reading Time via YouTube):
