Omega World News

Reading
The Omegas have been participating in literature circles for a fw weeks now, and all is going smoothly. The Omega Ones are figuring out how to apply the skills they learned through explicit instruction in the first part of the year. Omega Twos, being familiar with the process, are refining their skills. Hopefully everyone will have the opportunity to do each job once.

Here's a little background information on literature circle jobs. Each job corresponds to a different reading comprehension stratgey or skill.

Discussion Director (questioning): Writes four questions to ask the group. (Also must write his/her answers in complete sentences.)The questions must correspond to the current section of text assigned. There must also be once question from each of four levels of thinking: recall, comprehension (explicit), inference, and synthesis/evaluate. The students have question guides and starters to help them.

Fortune Teller (predicting): Makes a logical prediction about what might happen next in the story and supports it with evidence from the text. Prior knowledge of story structure and author's style/technique is also permissible evidence.

Savvy Summarizer (summarizing): Writes a detailed summary that includes the main events and important information.

Passage Picker (determining important information): Selects a passage, records the page number(s), writes about why s/he selected that section to talk about with the group and why it is important to the story.

Amazing Artist (visualizing): Draws a picture of a part of the story and writes a caption explaining the picture. Writes about why that part of the story is important.

*NOTE: Passage Picker and Amazing Artist can be combined into one job.

In addition to completing their jobs and reporting out to the group in weekly meetings, students work with unfamiliar words. Sometimes we work on decoding, but more often the focus is on using context clues to determine the meaning. Students also use the dictionary to check their guesses.

I hope this explanation of the literature circle jobs helps answer questions you may have had. Please feel free to grab my attention after school, if you'd like to chat about it (or anything else, really).

Writing
Omegas have been working on writing procedure pieces. Last week, they wrote about how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Then they got to trade papers with a classmate and test out someone's directions. In the end, everyone got to eat what they made. We will continue to work on procedure pieces this week. We will be taking a look at the VT Writing Rubric and Benchmarks to determine what constitutes a quality piece of writing.

Students have also participated in mini-lessons on sentence structure. They have learned that each sentence is made up of a subject (who or what does the action) and a predicate (the action). I have introduced helping verbs. We have also kept working with adjectives and pronouns.

Announcements
Tuesday (tomorrow) is a half-day for teacher inservice. Students will be dismissed at noon. There is no lunch at school, unless your child is going to afterschool.

Wednesday we are going on a field trip to the Firehouse Gallery to particiapte in an art display by Terry Hauptman and her fellow artist, Jerry.