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!