Reading Update

The theme for our literacy activities this week was “Being Yourself.” Our whole group story this week was a photo essay about a little girl named Rosina, who is deaf. We learned that even though she cannot hear, she is just like us in many ways! She learns the same things we do in school, plays the same sports, and enjoys arts and crafts like we do! She just happens to learn these things through the use of sign language. Our comprehension strategy continued to focus on summarizing. The children created a web displaying the main idea and details that we pulled from the text. New vocabulary words from this selection included: celebrate, cultures, deaf, language, relatives and signing. This story led us into a really nice discussion about developing an understanding, awareness, and respect for individuals who may be a little bit different from us. We talked about how important it is to acknowledge others around us, especially those with different capabilities, and even offering a helping hand (ex: opening a door, waiting a little longer for our turn, etc) if we are able to do so. The children and I also noted how lucky we are that we don't need the extra assistance that others might in their daily life, and how it would be so nice to offer a smile or a helping hand whenever we can.

The children practiced identifying the predicate in a sentence this week. We found that a good strategy for finding the predicate after in the sentence, was to first identify the subject of the sentence! We also learned that commas are placed in sentences to separate cities and states, as well as the date from the year! We “acted” out the punctuation in our sentences by raising our arms for a capital letter, stomping for a period, jumping for an exclamation point, and wiggling for a comma. Ask your child to show you!