The focus of this week for all classes began with spending time rewriting our previous writing assignment and drawing students' attention to particular areas of concern including syntax issues, article omission, or inappropriate tense usage. The students then had time to read their assignments aloud once corrected to give a point of reference for the type of language they might use to approach future writing assignments.
Next, the students spent time correcting responses on previous quizzes that dealt with subject-verb agreement, pronoun use, and homophone distinction. Upon finding the correct answers, students took the time to write their most challenging sentences or phrases out to build upon past errors.
For the second half of the week, the students in each class were refocused into particular areas of focus based on their needs.
For third grade, some students worked through handwriting, vocabulary distinction exercises, and reading comprehension. Other students still needed extra attention and practice with subject-verb agreement while others moved on to focus on present/past tense distinction. In addition, those further along in their progress worked on unscramble sentence exercises to enhance their sense of word order and word choice.
Similarly, the students in 4th grade were divided into two groups to build upon their varied range of skills. For one group, the students worked through vocabulary distinction exercises and unscrambling sentences while the other group focused their attention on handwriting and subject-verb agreement problems.
On the other hand, 5th grade was placed into 3 different groups with one group working on reading practice and sentence unscrambling, another group working through vocabulary distinction exercises and subject-verb agreement, and a last group working with reading comprehension and subject verb agreement.
The class for 6th grade was able to focus its attention on working with distinguishing the types of irregular past tense verbs and their spelling. They were also able to consider the reason for use of articles in sentences before nouns and why we must use "a" or "an".
Overall, the students worked well in their individual groups and were able to be given more direct attention on tasks without feeling they were behind or ahead. It also was a great opportunity to target particular skills that the students needed independently. I look forward to the next week and the students' continued progress in these areas.
Yours truly,
Mr. Wolef
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