Monthly Archives: November 2015

Writing 5 Update

Dear families,

if you have seen my last couple of blog posts, you have seen that I am updating on all of my classes and once again, I apologize for taking so long in between updates!

Students completed their realistic fiction stories that they worked hard to write – following a story mountain, building tension, and ending with a resolution or denouement that shows a theme as their main character learned a lesson. We have since received our shiny new Chromebooks, which makes life very easy for us! We are using Google Classroom for most of our assignments now; I encourage you to ask your child to show you our Google Classroom page as well as their writing folder in their Google Drive account. I think you will be impressed with how skillfully they can navigate these technologies independently already, and you will be able to see all of the work that we have been doing in class. We are so lucky to have the opportunity to use these machines!

As you will see if you have them show you our Google Classroom page and/or their writing folder, we have begun a new unit called Real-Fantasy-Real, a sub-genre of fantasy like the story Jumanji (and many others) in which the characters find themselves in a fantasy world and then must escape the fantasy world for some reason. We are presently in the planning phase,  and students have immensely creative ideas for their stories. I hope you will ask them to tell you about their story ideas! Perhaps they will even “share” their draft with you on Google Drive once we start drafting (if you have a Google Drive account). 🙂

Thanks for your continued support, and as always, please don’t hesitate to email me if you have any questions!

TAG 4/5 Writing Update

Dear families,

it has been a while since my last post – apologies for the long radio silence!

In our 4th/5th grade TAG Writing class, we finished up realistic fiction stories that we wrote by hand just in time to receive our shiny new Chromebooks! Now, almost everything that we are doing in class is online through Google Classroom and the students’ Google Drive accounts. I encourage you to ask your child to show you their Drive account and our class’s Google Classroom page; that is where all of our work is!

We have begun a new writing unit on personal essays. I have challenged the students to create a statement that is a guiding philosophy for their lives, inspired by the structure of the “This I Believe” essay series, which airs on All Things Considered on NPR. I hope you will ask your child to share his/her This I Believe statement with you and talk about the basis of this belief.  Students are drafting their essays with mini-stories and examples to illustrate their belief, and they are practicing using the literary tools of narrative authors such as varied sentence lengths and figurative language.

In the last two weeks, we have moved to a new unit in our spelling program. Instead of just studying how to spell the words on their lists, the students have received new packets of words with Greek and Latin roots organized thematically that they are learning the meanings of, and learning how to use. Our tests are on Mondays when Ms. Brannigan is with us; we are taking a break from this until we return from Thanksgiving break though, so our next test won’t be until Monday, December 7.

Ms. Brannigan has been working with the students to introduce them to Latin so they can start to make connections between Latin and English words. Students are even learning how to use analogies to analyze word meanings and connections.

Presently, we are in the midst of NaNoWriMo, but I know that few students have really had the chance to work on the challenge. I am offering my support one day a week in class, but our time is unfortunately quite limited for it. I hope to have our own novel writing challenge like this again in class later this year, so if your child didn’t get the chance to participate this time, there may be another opportunity later on this year. Stay tuned!

Thanks for all your support and as always, please don’t hesitate to email me if you have any questions.

TAG 5 Reading Update

Dear families,
it has been a while since I gave you an update! Apologies for the long delay.
Last week, we finished the book Fish and wrapped up all of our thinking about the character of Tiger, the symbolism of the fish, and the theme of the book. I was so impressed by the connections that the students made! I encourage you to take a look through some of the thinking work that they did that I have posted here on previous posts on the blog.

This week, we are beginning a new unit in nonfiction. Students are reading a few different (quite well-written) narrative nonfiction books about some key events in US history, and at the same time they are comparing and contrasting the structures of expository vs. narrative nonfiction. I encourage you to ask them to talk to you about some of the differences between those two sub-genres that they have explored so far.

Since we now have Chromebooks and access to Google Classroom (yay!), I have posted on our class’s Classroom page their reading assignments for their books. I am asking them to read and take notes on about 1/4 of their assigned book each night between now and Tuesday, which equates to about 25 pages a day. I have said they may write their notes on stickies or on a Google Doc – whatever format works best for them. If you ask them, I’m sure they can show you the Nonfiction Reading Guide page on the Classroom website so you can see their assignments and deadlines as well. Please note that while I always want them to have a good book of their own to read, I don’t expect them to read their 25 pages in addition to other 30 minutes of reading each day – the 25 pages can count as their daily at-home reading.

As always, please let me know if you have any questions!

 

TAG Reading and TAG Writing Update

Dear families,

in our Global Read-Aloud this week, we are discussing symbolism and how the author of Fish creates symbols in her book. We are making connections with the symbols in the books A Long Walk to Water and Inside Out and Back Again. Students have been coming up with some insightful ideas about what symbols are and what the symbols in the books represent. I recommend asking your child about this concept – you’d be surprised with what he/she has come up with!

In writing this month, we are excited that NaNoWriMo has begun! It’s not too late to register your child! Here’s the website. We will be having mini-workshops on Mondays throughout the rest of the month to guide kids, but as I have mentioned most of their work will be at home on this project. Happy writing!

In writing today, we started a new program for spelling and vocabulary that has a higher level of challenge than the spelling lists that we were using before. The list is attached below; students will be asked to complete 1-2 activities per night and tests will be on Mondays as before. In these tests, though, students will be asked to use the words from the list in context instead of merely spelling them correctly as before.

Root of It Unit 1 Water words