Friday, March 08, 2024

Dear Michael's parents,

Once again, Michael was simply amazing! He did really well in his homework and he picked up the concepts we explored today very quickly! As usual, he also was very actively engaged and very well-mannered and focused. Well done! Fantastic work! 

WHAT WE COVERED IN TODAY'S CLASS:

In today's lesson, we covered the following literacy concepts and strategies from Grade 3, Lesson 26, U2L8 - Protecting the Island (On-Level Reading):

(1) Key conceptual foundation themes: identification, clues pre-reading and post-reading
(2) Key / New vocabulary: translations, definitions, context, synonyms and antonyms, acroymns (What does NWHI stand for?)
(3) Reading strategies: decoding context clues, text features, and comprehension
(4) Genre study: Expositional Text
(5) Making Predictions: pre-reading, while reading, post-reading
(6) Summising the Main Idea: What is the story about?
(7) Understanding Key Themes: the author's message; why does he or she write the passage? 
(8) Connections and comparisions: text-to-self and text-to-world connections

EXTENSION WORK:

To supplement the curriculum we also explored new phrases verbal phrases, collocations, coupled with idiomatic and figurative phrases - which are critical in native dialogue - including the following listed below.

(1) to make a splash (idiom) e.g. He became famous pianist and made a huge splash in his field.
(2) get a spray (idiom) e.g. They got a spray from the boss.
(3) It's not a big deal! (common phrase and collocation) meaning "it" (the topic at hand) is not very important or a big problem

Additionally, we looked at some writing tips from the homework such as: Keeping tenses the same in the paragraph, using markers at the beginning of sentence (Then, After that, etc), and adding more descriptions and imagery (e.g. scrape "bark", deep scratches, tree "trunk").

HOMEWORK:

For homework if Michael has time, could he please complete the following:

(1) Complete  Lesson 26 - U2L8 - Grammar Practice

(2) Complete Lesson 27 - U2W4 - Weekly Test. This is optional.

(3) Before our next class, pre-read the reading passage in Lesson 28 U2L9 - What Do I Do Next (Read and Write), which will be for our next class. If Michael doesn't have time to do all the homework items above, he could do this item.

Have a wonderful week ahead and I look forward to seeing Michael again.

Warm wishes, and all the best for Michael and the entire family.

Kind regards,
Teacher Philip