What We Have Been Learning

READING  We have been using guiding questions to strengthen our ability to think critically about texts. We have also been identifying key words in the questions to tweak and reuse in our written responses. The reused question parts become subjects of our complete sentences while our answers act as the predicates of our sentences. This practice ensures that our written responses are detail rich and are written in the form of  complete sentences.

WRITING We have begun are first major writing project of the year, a five paragraph character analysis written in a scholarly voice. This project should take several weeks to work through all the stages of the writing process. This week, we began the prewriting stage. We chose characters from a favorite book and were encouraged to consider which characters would best lend themselves to a five paragraph essay. We discovered that in some cases, the antagonists might be the better choice for this kind of writing. After selecting characters, we used graphic organizers to brainstorm adjectives describing the character. We narrowed our choice of adjectives down to the three strongest and used a second graphic organizer to begin outlining our essays.

SOCIAL STUDIES We are continuing to work on locating our community of Bellevue on the globe by differentiating between continents, countries, states, and cities. We are also identifying the four oceans, and beginning to identify the 50 states of America. This week we focused our attention of the west coast.

MATH  We worked on our 9s this week. We looked for patterns to help us memorize our facts and have begun testing our speed with timed tests. How you can help at home. Continue practicing multiplication facts at home.

MISC We had our annual Walk-a-thon. Congratulations, Students for walking like champions.

STUDENTS, leave a comment telling us what your favorite thing of Spirit Week was.