Students started attending Language Arts class on the second day of school. Some students go to Mrs. Blankley’s and Mrs. Miller’s classrooms during this time.  Other students come join my room.  Mrs. Fox and Miss Erb will be working in my room this year.  Language Arts is taught utilizing a Rotational teaching model.  Students rotate through stations while in Language Arts.   Mrs. Fox and I will both teach Direct Stations where we work with small groups of students practicing reading, phonics, spelling, and writing skills.  Students will work at the Independent Station each day, often on their laptops accessing technology resources to support and reinforce the skills we are working on.  Finally students will work with their peers at the Collaborative Station.

On the first day in Language Arts class (Tuesday), we learned the expectations for these three stations and practiced how to collaborate by doing a fun activity where we tried to make as many words as possible with the letters in “Back to School.”

 

Most days students will rotate through 6 stations.  It takes some practice to learn the routines and expectations.  At my station, we have been doing Close Reading of a Recycling text.  We documented important ideas on a web and answered some text dependent questions where we must look back in the text to find information to support our answers.  In our first language arts/science module we are working to be recycling advocates.  We will be learning a lot about the environment and what we can do to preserve it.  We’re going to begin by looking at the 3 R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

At Mrs. Fox’s table, students are reviewing sight words and beginning to practice reading fluency.

At Collaborative Station students worked in partners or trios to do “Roll and Write”.  In this activity students roll a die to determine how to write a spelling word.  The reference card gives some fun options.  Since we haven’t started our spelling lists yet, students practiced writing sight words.

Ask your third grader to tell you a little bit about what he/she did at language arts this week…we sure were busy.