Cause and Effect

What happened? Why did it happen? These were the two most common questions of the week flying around our class. We explored cause and effect in the stories we read. The students learned that every effect has a cause and every cause leads to an effect.

First, we read Cookie's Week and saw how Cookie had some pretty bad effects because of her actions. For example, she fell in the toliet (cause) and water went everywhere! (effect)

Later on we watched a DVD reading of the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. The students made their own book with a cause and effect from the story. Ask your child about a cause and effect from this story!

Here is a website full of activities for this book.

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

Here are websites to practice these newly learned skills. Students very often confuse the two. Remember, the cause is the WHY and the effect is the WHAT.

Cause and Effect practice

Cause and Effect matching

Fall Festival Festivities

Boy did this week sure fly by! The students and I had a very fast and thrilling week of the first 9 week grading period. We were busy with literary pumpkins, our class party, Literacy Character Day, and the Fall Carnival. Sounds like a tough week huh?

We started the week off with decorating our class pumpkin for the Literary Pumpkin Contest. If you are not familiar with this, each class decorates a pumpkin based off of a book. Then, it is sent up with all the other class pumpkins to a huge display in the front of the school. Our class decorated our pumpkin to the book, Mr. Tanen's Ties. In the story, Mr. Tanen wears a tie for every little occasion at school. The students each decorated a tie with their own personal touch. Mr. Tanen was transformed into a pumpkin and you can see the many options of ties he now has thanks to our class!

On Thursday our school celebrated Literacy Character Day. Students were allowed to dress like their favorite character from a book. We had so many creative costumes! They were so excited to explain their costume. Any excuse to dress up at school is always fun right?

Is that a lion in our room? Oh no, just Miss E dressed like Leo from the book Leo the Lion.

We ended our Thursday with a little celebration. Thank you so much for the donations for our party. These fun events are possible because of you!We had cookies, doughnuts, candy, pretzels, goldfish, juice boxes, candy, candy, candy, and I think candy. YUM! We all loved this end of the day pick-me-up.

Thank you again Mrs. S for coming in to help with our party! Kids and candy can be a dangerous combination.

The Fall Carnival was a huge success too. Thank you Mr./Mrs. A for running our class football toss booth. It was so nice to get to chat and visit with parents and students.

When we return back on Monday, we will start the 2nd 9 weeks. Don't forget to check out our new Standard Based Bulletin Board for your child's Narrative Writing. Also, remember that every 9 weeks Mrs. Tsengas and I switch classes. Therefore, if you have me as a homeroom teacher you will now go to Mrs. Tsengas in the morning. See you Monday!

The Wonders of Publishing

Hip Hop Hooray for all our writers! This week the students finished publishing their Narratives, or short personal stories. They have been working SO hard each day in class. Take a look at that dedication!They were so proud to finally have produced amazing true stories about their lives. Students are now familiar with all the parts of the writing process.

1. Prewriting-Free writing, journalling, listing, brainstorming.

2. Drafting-Selecting best ideas, getting the stories down, speed writing, using timelines. This is time to load up on details and write everything they said, felt, thought, remembered, etc.

3. Revising- 'Dressing up' the story, checking sequence, add/delete/move sentences around. During revising, stories often become written all over. They were taught how to 'cut and paste' sentences and how to use numbers to add more details on another page.

4. Editing-'Stain Sticking' the story for punctuation, capitals, and spelling. Students used editing checklists, rubrics and peer edited as well.

5. Publishing-Rewriting our final masterpiece! They get fresh, clean paper and copy over their seed journal onto publishing paper.

Don't forget about the cover page! Students made a cover page that illustrated an important event in their story. What beautiful cover pages they were!

Congratulations again to all authors and illustrators!

Quotation Marks

"Oh my gosh! I heard Miss E is teaching quotation marks." Sarah exclaimed to Doug.
Doug asked, "Well, they are learning how to add details to their writings and Miss E always says to write EVERYTHING."
"There are a lot of rules though," Sarah said,"I think I better practice."

Yes, this is true. This week the boys and girls learned about quotation marks and talking tags. We discussed how quotation marks show readers when a character is talking. The actual words that are spoken need to be surrounded by quotation marks. Also, we learned that talking tags (She said, he stated, Miss Evanko whispered) tells us who/how the person is talking. Learning how and when to use them is so important because it will help them understand stories they read and they will use dialogue more in their writing. As we investigated in books we discovered the rules to using quotation marks. Here are some the rules:

Quotation Mark Rules
-Use a capital letter with the first word when the talking tag is first. She said, “Where are we going?”
-Do not use a capital letter if the quote is first and the talking tag isn’t a proper noun. “Let’s hurry!” she said.
-Do not use a capital letter with the first word if the talking tag interrupts and continues later in the sentence. “I love to go biking?” Tommy told his mom, “can we go now?”
-Use a comma to introduce a quotation after a talking tag.
-Begin a new paragraph each time a new character is talking.
-Put punctuation mark before the quotation mark when ending your sentence.
-Use one set of quotation marks even if the person talking says more than one sentence. “I brought my folder. I thought I left it at home,” I told my teacher.
You do not need quotation marks with indirect quotations. It often begins with the word that. Bob said that he was thirsty.

If you child is confused, don't panic! There are quite a few rules to using this tricky marks. Below is a great site to help them practice looking for where to add quotes, capitals, and commas.

http://edhelper.com/Quotation_Marks.htm

"I'll see you on Monday!" Miss Evanko told all of her Blogger friends.