News From Title 1 Reading Grades 3-5

       Welcome back to Title 1 everyone! The beginning of the year is always so busy for us.  We spent the first two weeks of school assessing all of the students using the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA), creating our schedules, and organizing classes. The students promptly began working on our weekly skills. Each grade will focus on six-seven skills throughout each nine weeks.

3^rd Grade: The 3^rd graders spend two days a week learning a multi-sensory approach to learning called Orton-Gillingham. This strategy teaches the students how to decode words by focusing on phonemic awareness. We write letters in the sand, finger tap words, and write sentences by pounding the syllables. The rest of the week is focused on our “I Can Statements”. We have spent a lot of time working with prefixes and suffixes and determining how they change the meaning of a word. They used Venn Diagrams to compare and contrast information about different animals. We have also been working on locating the main idea and the details that support it. We have ended the quarter working on characters and setting.

4^th Grade: The fourth graders have spent a lot of time working with story elements. We read Mrs. Mack  by Patricia Polacco. We discussed the characters, setting, problem and solution of the story. The students even used our mobile lab to create an interactive character map on their favorite character of the story. We also spent time distinguishing between fact statements from opinion statements.

5^th Grade: The 5^th graders recently finished reading The Night Queen’s Blue Velvet Dress. While reading this story, they discussed setting and how to interpret clues from the author to explain the setting of a story. They also focused on noting details from the story. Each student picked one constellation that was mentioned in the story. Using the mobile labs, they researched this constellation.

We are so excited to announce that we now have IPODs in our classroom. The students will be using them throughout the year. There are many apps that will be useful for helping the students improve their reading comprehension.

I would like to thank all of the parents for attending our annual Title 1 Parent Meeting on October 24^th. I look forward to seeing everyone at conferences in November.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Linden

klinden@bcsoh.org                                (330) 273-0487