This week’s Focus Stories will help us to
answer the Essential Question: Why is it important to help your friends? Both of our stories fall under the genre of
Fantasy.
Our first story this week will be The Little Engine That Could by
Watty Piper, illustrated by Loren Long. A little train carrying oodles of toys to all of the good
boys and girls is confronted with a towering, seemingly impassable mountain. As
nicely as they ask, the toys cannot convince the Shiny New Engine or the Big
Strong Engine--far too impressed with themselves--to say anything but "I
can not. I can not." It is left up to the Little Blue Engine to overcome
insurmountable odds and pull the train to the other side.
Our second story this week will be You Can Do It, Curious George!
By Margaret and H.A. Rey. In this story,
we will join one of our favorite characters as he learns what it is that he
does best.
Our Target Skills will be substituting
phonemes, pausing for punctuation, blending words, using context clues,
subject-verb agreement, and making predictions.
We will also be working to match the phonemes /z/ and /v/ to their
corresponding letters.
Letters: Zz and Vv
High-Frequency Words: look,
very, their, saw, put, out
Oral Vocabulary (The Little Engine That Could): bellowed,
dingy, rumbled, valley, waiters, and weary
Selection Vocabulary (Curious George): chef,
different, prize, and slope
Thank you to www.amazon.com for the cover images and summaries!
