Things to Know....
-Conferences are January 22nd-28th. I will post my schedule on the blog for your reference later this week.
-Immigration Day will be on January 31st in the morning. Each class is hoping to get four volunteers. Please let me know if you are interested. You will receive a packet detailing volunteer's responsibilities if you choose to volunteer. More information will come home soon.
Things We're Learning and Working on...
-Morning Work- Morning Work is taking a more important role this half of the year. Every morning, the students will get one language arts and one math assignment. This is helping to reinforce editing skills, parts of speech, math computation, and problem solving skills. If morning work is not completed by the end of the day, it needs to be completed for homework.
-Journals- This nine weeks, we are writing 3-4 times a week in either our Writing Journals or Reading Response Journals. For the Writing Journals, students are given a prompt and given 10 minutes to write a 6-10 sentence paragraph on that prompt. This will help to reinforce skills taught throughout the year in writing. In the Reading Response Journals, students will read their independent reading book for 15-20 minutes and then be asked questions about the plot, characters, problem solution, or other issues in the book and asked to answer or respond to these questions. Occasionally, journals will be graded.
-Reading- Vocabulary Unit 8 this week. We are reading a non-fiction book entitled Immigrant Kids in guided reading groups. This will take a couple of weeks to get through. We are working on the skills of main idea and details, making connections, cause and effect, and visualizing. The Independent Reading Rubric for this nine weeks will go home by Tuesday.
-Writing/Grammar- Our focus this nine weeks is narrative writing. We are reviewing these parts of speech this week: nouns, verb pronoun, and adjective.
-Social Studies- Our unit on Industry and Immigration continues. We have four large EQs for this unit- the first EQ has two smaller EQs. See the EQs below. There will be a quiz on the first EQ late this week or early next week.
Immigration and Industry EQs
-What were the economic and social changes that happened as a result of growth and expansion of industry?
How did people fight for better working conditions in the late 19th century?
What problems did people face as cities grew?
-How did different groups of workers live and work in the late 19th century?
-How were the lives of immigrants similar and different?
-How did American Indian tribes change in the late 19th century?
