This week students have been reading Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief. It is always exciting for me when students "get into" a novel and don't want to stop reading. I had a student from my second hour class ask me today if they could just stay with me and read all day. I would love that! I had another student from my fourth hour class who asked if she could get started reading right away because it was the first time in her life that she was interested in a book; she even asked to take a copy home to keep reading after class! I can't tell you how happy this made my heart! I LOVE when my students find a book they are passionate about reading!
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I hope everyone had a fantastic spring break! It was really nice getting a week off this year!
This week we will begin reading Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. We have been reading and learning about Greek mythology, so students should be able to make several connections with what we have been studying in class. We will also be doing some review of skills in preparation for the upcoming MAP test. This week we will practice affixes, cause and effect, fact and opinion, and sequencing. We will be taking a MAP practice test on Monday and Tuesday. Please make sure your student gets plenty of rest and comes to school as this will be included in his/her grade this quarter.
This week we will continue our myths, legends, and tales unit by reading the myths of Demeter and Persephone, Hades and the Underworld, and Poseidon. We will also be working on grammar skills, spelling, and punctuation. Thursday we will have an all-school assembly beginning around 1:30. Parents are welcome to join us as we celebrate students who were nominated as 3rd quarter students of the quarter and we will also be having some very special former students come as guest speakers. There is no school on Friday, March 25, and we will be enjoying a week-long spring break, returning on Monday, April 4. Today we had the pleasure of hosting Mrs. Susansylvia Scott the Storyteller (who DOES take the garbage out) with our Kansas City Arts Partners. Mrs. Scott did a fantastic job incorporating tall tales (from our current unit) into her lesson with the kids. She reviewed tall tales, told the kids a tall tale, and got them up and moving as they participated in the parts of a great story and created a tall tale. Thank you Mrs. Scott! Last week we were introduced to our new unit and read a couple of Greek myths. This week we will continue, reading the myths of Prometheus, Orpheus and Eurydice, Icarus and Daedalus, and Phaethon, Son of Apollo.
Objectives:
This week we will begin our new unit over myths, legends, and tales.
Key Question: What can stories teach us? Unit Goals Literary Analysis
This week students will write a short biography about a person of their choice. We will kick off the week with a lesson over plagiarism and credible sources in the learning commons with Ms. Travis. The rest of the week we will spend in the computer lab, researching and writing biographies.
http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/indepth/peopleinthenews/activities/index.asp?article=research http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/indepth/peopleinthenews/activities/index.asp?article=resources Students completed the MAP practice test today. It has been a long two days but we survived. We did some warm-up dancing before we started this morning to help get our blood flowing and our brains working! Luckily, at least to my knowledge, no one has a picture of me dancing. Hahaha
Monday and Tuesday students will be taking a practice MAP test. Please make sure your student comes to school and is well rested, having eaten a healthy breakfast. This is meant to help us make sure we have all the kinks out of the testing process, let the students familiarize themselves with the online test, and let us know if there are any changes we need to make before taking the actual test in May.
This week in ELA we will wrap up our unit on biographies, autobiographies, and summarizing. We will review early this week and plan on taking the unit test toward the end of the week. Review notes are available through Nearpod and linked in our Google Classroom - please make sure to study! The past few weeks we have been working on summarizing, which happens to be our MAP word this week! We read "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe and worked on writing summaries that include all of the important details but none of the unnecessary information - some of us had to really work to figure out which details weren't important to the overall story. After writing a summary, students created their own "black cat" to display with their summaries.
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mrs. harder
The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more things that you learn, the more places you'll go. Archives
April 2016
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