Week 23 Newsletter

Announcements

Monday – 1/27 – Field Trip to Coca Cola Space Center

Friday – 1/31 – Red Folders, Traveler Reports, & Achieve Logs are DUE

Friday (6:00)/Saturday (4:00) – Little Mermaid Play @ Rainey McCullers

·       Any student that brings their ticket stub from the play is allowed to dress OUT OF UNIFORM Monday, 1/27!

Homework

·       Two Achieve articles – Due Friday

·       Research on historical figure – as needed

Reading

In reading this week we finished up our unit on Theme! One of our standard is for students to be able to differentiate between drama, prose, and poetry, so this week we looked continued looking for themes in dramas. Some students have been working in groups to write their own stories in drama format. They are using their knowledge of theme and including their chosen theme multiple times throughout their scripts. Once they finished the writing portion, they practiced performing their drama, and will perform for their classmates. It will be their classmate’s job to determine the theme of the drama.  Other groups of students have been given scripts of fables and fictional stories. They have been practicing reading their scripts, following the directions the scripts gives, and performing for their classmates. Their peers will also have the job of deciding what theme is being delivered through their performance.

Next week we will move onto looking at the major differences between poems, drama, and prose, and refer to the structural elements of each.

Writing

In writing we will continue our informational writing on the historical figures. This week we finished gathering websites sources and subtopics. We also looked at ways to grab the reader’s attention in the introduction of the paper. They will write their own introduction and start on the body paragraphs. We will talk about various transitions they may include to make sure their papers sounds fluent rather than robotic. J Please be on the lookout for research homework. There may be nights when they need to gather more research or finish writing part of their draft.

ELA

In grammar this week we continued looking at progressive verbs. We continued practicing when to use who/whom. One trick we talked about is he/she = who and him/her = whom.

·                   Ex: The girl _____ is in third grade, got first place in the art show.

·                  Ask yourself “Who got first place in the art show?” SHE got first place in the art show.             She=WHO

I also introduced the relative pronoun “whose.” This is the only relative pronoun that shows possession/ownership.

·                 Ex: Students, _______, parents are here, get a homework pass.

·                Parents belong to the students so the relative pronoun is whose.

Next week we will talk about the correct uses of “which” and “that.”