Reading is Magical! Reading can take you places real and imaginary; you can meet people from all over the world and beyond- past, present, and future! Nothing is impossible in a book! The school goal this month is 100,000 minutes. That seems like a lot, but when you break it down it’s not! If a student read 20 minutes per night for 5 nights, that’s 100 minutes. If every student in my room read that much, then our class would have read 2100 minutes in one week! Times that by 4 weeks for the month of March, that would be 8,400 minutes! And that’s just our class! If everyone read 30 minutes per night for 5 nights, that would be 3150 minutes per week equaling 12,600 minutes for the month of March!!!! WOW!!! Can you imagine how proficient you would be if you did anything for 600 minutes (that’s 10 hours)?!?! Imagine how many new words, new places, new characters, and new experiences your child would have encountered if they just read 30 minutes per night!
To help track all of these new and wondrous experiences through books, please have your child complete the reading log with the titles of the books they read and the minutes they spent reading on the Reading Log (it’s green this week). Just initial that they actually read, and have them turn it in on Friday along with their Reading and Spelling Menu and notebook.
Spelling Bee
Our Classroom Spelling Bee is this Friday. Students were sent a list home last Friday to study. Everyone will participate. Here are the guidelines and procedures as given by Ms. Green:
On Bee days, at whatever time you wish, have students stand at their desks, give the first student a word. The student will:
- Repeat the word
- Spell the word with appropriate capitalization, hyphenation, apostrophes, etc.
- Repeat the word again
- Wait for your response- “Correct” or “That is incorrect”. If incorrect, give them the correct spelling (Unless you are down to the final two, if so, call the other students and have them spell the word. If correct, give them a second word and if spelled correctly they win! If incorrect, tell both the correct spelling and resume the bee, giving the first student a new word.
The student may ask for a sentence or a repetition of the word. The student can begin to spell, stop one time and then continue to spell the word, or restart from the beginning of the word, but they must restate the letters in the same order as when they first uttered them- they must not say the word before they continue to spell it. This is called retracing. For example “Cat, C- A, pause C- A- T, Cat” is acceptable but “Cat, C- A, pause K- A- T” is not. They cannot pause and restart more than once. They cannot start to spell, then ask for a repetition or a sentence. If they do, they have forfeited. You, as the announcer cannot EM- pha- size any part of the word when you say it. If so, the word must be thrown out and a new word given.
If the student spelled the word correctly, they remain standing and you move on to the next student.
If the student spelled the word incorrectly, they sit and are no longer in the bee. They do not come up again for the next round, They do not start over in the next level of the bee.
I will continue until I have three second grade and three third grade finalists. Those students will then proceed to the grade level bee Friday, March 20. There are separate grade level bees, so my 2nd graders will compete with the other 2nd graders, and the 3rd graders will compete with the other 3rd grade classes.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact myself at fowlerj@dearbornschools.org or Ms. Green at greenc@dearbornschools.org.