Category Archives: Writing

TAG and 5th Writing: Big news!

Dear parents,

this post relates to all students who have me as their writing teacher, TAG 4th/5th AND 5th grade writing 4th block.

As of today, students have just been introduced to and have logged in for the first time to their very own learning blog! They are beginning to customize their blogs by changing the theme. As the rest of the year progresses (and into next year, for 4th graders) they will be able to use their blog as a public place to post their writing and reflections of their learning.

You can find your child’s blog by going to this website and finding your child’s name along the right hand side. Their name links to their blog!

I encourage you to have your child show you how to log in to their blog and what they anticipate using it for. Please, as always, let me know if you have any questions or concerns!

Writing 5 Update

Dear families,

this post relates to my 4th block 5th grade writing class.

Students are busily planning their research paper drafts! They have gathered and organized information with a note-taking technology called Google Keep, and they are currently writing outlines to plan the organization of each of the sections of their research papers.

Due to scheduling constraints, for the weeks of April 11-15 and 18-22 we will have to pause on our writing projects to use our writing time to review some math, so that all students have time to be adequately prepared for their math SOL. During that time, I’ll encourage students to continue writing on their own each day. I’ll be giving them more information and getting back in touch as this week ends.

Presently, we are in the middle of a word study unit, and students are really thinking through the parts of the words and the meanings of the roots that are in them! We have our word study test this Friday, April 8. We will have word study homework today (Monday) and Wednesday, April 6.

As always, please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions or concerns.

Exciting Writing Opportunities

Hi families,

This post is for any and all of my students!

There are a few writing opportunities of which I have recently been made aware that I have been meaning to share with you. I apologize for not sending this out much sooner!

  • ACPS poetry contest! Students are encouraged to participate in the ACPS poetry contest – they may write a poem in any form, but may only write on one side of the page that they use. Students should turn submissions in to me by Wednesday, March 16
  • Northern VA Writing Project Saturday Workshops: There have been a few that I neglected to write to you about in time, but there is one coming up on Saturday, April 2 at the GMU Fairfax Campus. 9:00a-1:00p; $70 for new students, $65 for returning. More info/register online
  •  Northern VA Writing Project Summer Institute: July 11-22 (M-F only), 9:00a-1:00 p at GMU Fairfax Campus. Application deadline March 30. More info/apply online

Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks to Ms. Sangare for the heads-up about the Northern VA Writing Project events!

Writing 5 Update

Dear families,

This post relates to my 5th grade only writing class (4th block of the day).

NEW UNIT OF STUDY

We have finished persuasive essays! Scored essays will be coming home for you to sign later this week. Please be on the lookout!

We are beginning a new unit in research. This unit will take us until about spring break. Please ask your child about his or her chosen research topic and sub-topics. On Tuesday in class students will be introduced to a new tool called Google Keep that they will be using to organize their research notes. Please encourage them to show you Google Keep on their Google accounts!

WORD STUDY

We are deep into our new word study routines! This two weeks (February 22-March 4) we have a packet with the list and all assignments included (attached at the bottom of this post).

This week, we have word study homework today (illustrated words for section 3) and Wednesday (practice test). The test will be on Friday, March 4. Please encourage your child to study!

As you can see when you open the document below, we have three sections in our word study practice with each new bi-weekly list:

  • commonly misspelled words (this week is their/there/they’re)
  • strong vocabulary words (this week we have luxurious/anxious/ridiculous/ambitious)
  • Greek and Latin roots (this week is frac/struct/fac/rupt)

GRAMMAR

We are practicing identifying spelling and capitalization errors in practice sentences as warm-up, and we will work on identifying those same mistakes in our own writing.

TYPING

Two to three days a week, students are working for about 10 minutes on typing.com to become more efficient. They can always practice at home as well! Everyone’s typing skills are quickly improving as the year progresses. You can find out their progress at any time at home by logging in to their typing.com account.

WordStudyList6

Writing 5 Update

Dear families,

This post is in regards to my 5th grade writing class (4th block of the day).

We have begun working on persuasive writing – one of my favorite genres of writing! Students have chosen a topic they care about, and they have found three compelling reasons to support it. We are currently working on building evidence to illustrate and prove each reason. We have discussed what makes solid evidence – that in some cases it’s facts, statistics and data; and in other cases, it’s personal stories and “what if” scenarios that paint mental images for readers. We have also practiced being discerning users of the Internet for research, using the acronym AAA: Appearance, Author, and Accuracy to find valid, trustworthy websites to gather evidence when facts and statistics are needed.

Students are working on building their plan for their persuasive essays, called boxes and bullets, on their Google Drive accounts. I hope you will take a look at their plan with them over the weekend! Next week, we will finish making our plans and begin drafting our essays using the language of persuasive writers.

We have just started a slightly new spelling/vocabulary program with three sections (commonly misspelled words, strong vocabulary words, and word patterns with Greek and Latin roots). All the students in the class are working on the same list right now because we realized that it is important for the entire class to not only have exposure to, but also to master the skills that are on the lists – both for their own writing, and also for test-taking skills as the year goes on. We will take a break from it next week as we have a shortened week, but the week of January 25, students will receive a new list that we will go over piece by piece. They will be tested on that list the following Thursday, February 4. I will give a practice test during the week of the test as homework, so that you and they can see what the test will be like and be fully prepared for it.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me!

Update: 5th Grade Writing (4th Block)

Dear families,

this post is for families of students who I have in my 4th block, 5th grade only writing class.

We have just finished with our Real-Fantasy-Real stories! Students have published and shared their work on this new and exciting genre. They have submitted them to me for grading, so please stay tuned to receive their grades after the winter vacation, but for now I encourage you to ask your child to show you his or her writing (it is all accessible on their Google Drive accounts!). They really worked hard at being creative with their stories and their fantasy elements.

After the holiday, we will begin a new unit in persuasive essays, and we will continue with our two different groups of word study/vocabulary practice that will go on for two weeks at a time, with homework about two days each week and tests every other Friday.

In the meantime, I hope you will encourage your child to work on a creative writing endeavor over the vacation to keep those creative muscles growing (but of course, I will not require any student to do that work over the vacation).

I hope you all have a wonderful vacation, full of warmth and the joy of your loved ones and your favorite treats close to you!

 

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 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

Exciting challenge for all of my writing classes!

Dear families:

In November, I would like to extend the challenge to each of the writers in my writing classes to participate in NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month! This challenge will see students writing an entire novel by the end of the month of November!

Here is a bit of background from the NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program’s website:  

“National Novel Writing Month happens every November! It’s a fun, seat-of-your-pants writing event where the challenge is to complete an entire novel in just 30 days. For one month, you get to lock away your inner editor, let your imagination take over, and just create!

That means participants begin writing November 1 and must finish by midnight, November 30. The word-count goal for our adult program is 50,000 words, but the Young Writers Program (YWP) allows 17-and-under participants to set reasonable, yet challenging, individual word-count goals.”

 

The purpose of this challenge is not to create a flawlessly designed book, but to dive deeply into the creative process of building a complex storyline and dynamic characters. This process will see your child at times feeling a bit blocked and even perhaps frustrated, but sticking with a story to make it truly a chapter book will have transformative power over their writing identities; it will be a chance for them to really dive in to the talent and potential they all have hiding inside as writers!

The biggest obstacle we are facing with this project is that we will not be able to spend much (if any) class time dedicated to it during the month of November as we’ll have to be writing essays; therefore, it will have to be an at-home project.

I very strongly encourage your child to participate. I have a number of resources that I will share with you to help your child if they decide to accept the challenge, and I will be happy to help you as much as possible throughout the month! I have set up an educator account with the organization and if your child does register for the program, I will add them as a student so that I can see their progress and give them help as they go along, whenever I can.


I would suggest starting now to help your child prepare for this challenge. Here’s how:

  1. Go to this website to create an account for your child. They are required to have an email address for this. All 4th and 5th graders at CBES have Gmail accounts (which we have not done anything with yet in class) that you could use to register them.
  2. Send me an email at katherine.cherry@acps.k12.va.us to let me know you have registered your child. I will find them on the database and add them to my class.
  3. Look through the resources that the website offers – you will find many helpful items to get your child started!
  4. Have a designated destination for your child’s work on their novel – in a special notebook? On a computer? On their Google Drive account? You decide what works best for your child.
  5. Set aside time for them to write every day throughout the month of November – 30 minutes a day should be enough, but maybe they will want more! 🙂

On a few days (3-4 days altogether) during November, we will take some class time to use as “workshop time” for kids to receive guidance and coaching from me while working on their novels, but most of their work on this project will have to be at home. Thanks for your understanding about our obligations.

Please email me with any questions you have! I am excited about this project and am here to help. I hope you and your child will decide to participate!

Updates for writing classes

Dear families,

I think I have been confusing some of you lately when I post about my writing classes, which are on two separate tracks. For now, to ease confusion, I’ll put all my writing classes’ updates into one post. I hope this helps!

TAG Writing (4th and 5th grade, 2nd block): students are finishing their first published stories – realistic fiction. These final drafts are going to be hand-written, and I will score them using the attached rubric. Once all students’ Google Drive accounts are set up, a lot more of their writing will be done within their Drive accounts and final drafts will be typed and printed. Today (Friday) is their last day to finish their stories in class. A few students have received extensions to turn their stories in on Monday, but everyone else is turning theirs in today. From here, we are going to move on to writing personal and then persuasive essays.

In spelling, this class has a list of words with prefixes each week. They have in-class warm-ups and homework Monday through Thursday with these words (please see previous post for more information).

Writing (5th grade only, 4th block): students are in the revising process of their first published story, a realistic fiction story. We are revising by getting rid of boring words (like “said” and “mad”) and replacing them with more literary words; stretching out the detail in the most important parts of the story by showing, not telling; and by finding the theme (lesson) in our stories and making them end so that our character learns the lesson we want to teach readers.  We will be finishing and writing final drafts of these stories next week. I will be using the attached rubric to score each student’s story.  These stories will be written by hand, but once students’ Google Drive accounts are set up, more of the entire writing process will be completed on the computers through their accounts, for future units. Our next unit up is essays – personal and persuasive.

In word study, we started this week and will have tests every two weeks. Most students are in a group that has a word study list including three sections: commonly misspelled words, strong fifth grade vocabulary, and word pattern words.  We are working through each part of the list together in class. I will keep the same three sections all year with different words each two weeks.Students should expect to have word study homework on Tuesdays and Thursdays; tests will be every other Friday. Our first test will be on Friday, October 16. Tests will require students not only to spell words correctly, but also to know their meanings and how to use them in sentences. Please email me if you have any questions!

Writing Unit 1 Realistic Fiction I Can statements