Unit 4, Week 2 - It Is the Wind / From Caterpillar to Butterfly

     This week our Focus Stories will help us the answer the question: How do living things change as they grow?  Our first story belongs to the genre of realistic fiction, entitled It Is the Wind, written by Ferida Wolff and illustrated by James Ransome.  Written like a poem, this story leads us to explore what happens outside in the hours from dusk until dawn.  

     Our second focus story will be From Caterpillar to Butterfly, an informational text written by Deborah Helligman and illustrated by Bari Weissman.  In this story, a caterpillar comes to school in a jar and the class watches the caterpillar each day as it grows and changes. Soon, it disappears into a hard shell called a chrysalis.  The process is seen through the children's eyes as they experience the excitement of observing the wiggly caterpillar, watch it molt, change into a chrysalis, endure the endless waiting, and stare in wonder as a Painted Lady butterfly emerges and dries its wings. 

      Our Target Skills this week will be: blending and segmenting phonemes, reading with expression, multiple-meaning words, determining sequence of events, realizing the importance of an author's word choice, and making inferences/predictions.  We will also be working with the letter Gg, and its corresponding phoneme--/g/.  

Letter: Gg

High-Frequency Words: find, from, but, this, came, on (Please continue to practice ALL of our High-Frequency Words at home!)

Oral Vocabulary (It Is the Wind): creaks, hare, hinge, howling, path, sways

Selection Vocabulary (From Caterpillar to Butterfly):  ever, pumps, rush, tiny

Thank you to www.amazon.com for the cover images and summaries!