Update: 4th/5th TAG Writing

Dear families,

this post is for families of students in my combined 4th/5th grade TAG writing block.

We have just finished (and students have received their grades for) our long endeavor of writing essays about our beliefs. Please ask your child to show you his/her essay and grades! I will print and send home paper copies in January, but for now you can see it all online!

This week, students began planning for and embarking on extended creative writing projects, beginning by experimenting with genre, form, and topic. I hope you will talk about your child’s creative writing project with him/her, and encourage him or her to work on it over the vacation to continue flexing those creative writing muscles. Of course, I am not requiring any student to work on that project over the holiday – only if they want to!

When we return in January, we will begin our next writing unit – persuasive essays! At that point, creative projects will become work that they will pick up when they finish with their assigned class work, and at home at some points if they want. I am asking that students try to spend about an hour per week on their creative writing projects, whether in spare time at school or at home.

We have been working on typing.com and the BBC’s website Dance Mat Typing to become more efficient at typing, for 2-3 days per week as a warm-up in class. Students are beginning to really see improvements in their typing speed at this point! They may want to practice once or twice at home over break as well.

We will continue with our Greek and Latin roots vocabulary in lieu of spelling for a few weeks when we return, and later on in January or at the beginning of February we will begin diving into some more explicit grammar instruction, for students to start to develop an understanding of the parts of sentences.

For now, I hope you all have a warm and restful holiday break, full of the joy of your loved ones and your favorite foods!

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

Update: 5th TAG Reading

Dear families,
this post is for families of students in my first block TAG reading class.

We have just finished studying nonfiction text features and structures. Students have read some very challenging narrative nonfiction about important events in history.

For our winter vacation, the class has set a goal for themselves of reading a whopping 4,350 pages! Each student has considered his/her habits and the time that they will have during vacation to read and has set an individual goal (that is part of our whole class goal) of total pages to read over break. We have established a big reward of extra recess if everyone in the class manages to meet his/her goal over the vacation, but we need your help! Please would you initial your child’s reading log each day to acknowledge/vouch for the reading that he/she reports doing over the break, then sign the log at the end of break as an acknowledgement of the entire effort? All the students have identified books that they want to read toward this goal (but if you need more ideas, please see the previous post that includes a Padlet with book recommendations from classmates). Thank you in advance for your help!

I hope you all have a restful and joyous break full of seeing lots of loved ones and eating your favorite treats!

 

TAG Reading 5 Update

Dear families,

This post pertains to 5th graders who have me as their TAG reading teacher first block in the mornings.

We are reading nonfiction books right now. We are sharing a few *excellent* books written by Jim Murphy: Blizzard, A Young Patriot, and The Great Fire – all narrative nonfiction accounts of some major events in US history.

Students have completed one of the books and have written summaries independently and collaboratively, and just today they began their second of the three books. I have shared a document with them on Google Classroom that is a template for taking notes, although some students said they would prefer to write notes on post-its, which is also fine. I am asking them this time to succinctly state the main idea of each chapter in one sentence, as well as to find and define 5 new words in each chapter. These books are a treasure trove of amazing new vocabulary for the students, so I am sure they will find many more than 5 words! I have attached a Word document version of the note-taking template I created (meant to be filled out online) for your information.

I am asking students to read over the weekends, but only about 25 pages for the entire weekend – per the ACPS reading policy that students read every day, including over the weekend. I know your lives are busy, though, so we are working flexibly around busy travel schedules!

I encourage you to look at the book with your child and discuss the main events – these books are written at a high level and they are challenging for the students!

As always, please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions. Thank you for your continued support!

NotesonNonfictionBook

TAG Writing 4/5 Update

Dear families,

This post pertains to students who have me as their TAG Writing teacher second block in the mixed 4th and 5th grade class.

We have had a busy week back, revising and re-drafting our This I Believe Essays! Today we co-created the rubric that we (students and teacher) are going to use to evaluate students’ final products. I have attached the rubric for your perusal. Unfortunately, we had a fire drill right in the middle of our work and 4th graders had to leave just afterward for a performance, so their input into the creation of the rubric was sadly limited!

I am asking students to finish and turn in a final version of their This I Believe essays by next Wednesday, December 9, including their rubric which they will have filled out to evaluate their work.

In addition, on Monday, December 7, we will have our next vocabulary test. This time it will be a fill-in-the-blank test with a word bank. I have attached this week’s packet just in case you need an extra copy for studying over the weekend! The packet is due completed on Monday as well.

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

Greek Latin Roots Unit 3

ThisIBelieveI-CanStatements

Math 5 Update

Dear families,

finally I am updating about my math class! Please note that this only pertains to 5th grade math students who have me as their third block math teacher.

We just had our test on decimal computation. Your child should have brought his/her graded test home to be signed. If not, please ask them for it! We are now beginning our next unit in geometry. You will find attached our study guide for the unit in English and in Spanish. We have a LOT of vocabulary this unit. I encourage you to talk to your child about which words are red, yellow, and green for them (and what the colors mean!).

Please let me know if you have any questions!

geometry study guides Eng Span

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!