Happy New Year! Well, that went by fast, didn't it? I trust you all had a wonderful and restful break and are ready and prepared for the next phase of 4th grade Language Arts! I enjoyed my time off tremendously. My family and I spent Christmas in Boone where it was cold and blustery, just like the mountains are supposed to be in winter! (no snow, though, which was a little disappointing). We also traveled to Washington, DC and visited museums, ate too much wonderful food and did a (very little) shopping. It was cold and blustery in DC too, but we had a great time. I love the city...in short doses:)
Our next unit will begin this week, next week in earnest. This unit is "Literature Settings: Weather or Not" and it asks the guided question " How does the author's setting affect the plot of a story?". We will explore poetry, setting, art an d geography with this unit. Students will be completing a research paper in class based on a weather related idea, for example: hurricanes, earthquakes, clouds, etc... We will read poetry that relates to weather and focuses on setting, comparing and contrasting different ways of viewing the weather.We will continue sharing weather in the form of news in class daily. Students share the local weather and the weather from a place in the world of their choosing, finding it on the map for their fellow students. We also share a news story from the Scholastic News. We will be reading a vast array of different genres this unit. We will read the novel "Out of the Dust" aloud in class later in the month. The book is written in poetic form and tells the tale of a young girls struggles with life and death during the dust bowl in the Midwest. It is a very touching story, I think students will enjoy it. We will focus on learning similes and metaphors during the reading, as well as writing our own poems based on our research project. We will examine great works of art to determine how artists tell stories using setting in their paintings. This should be a great month of growth and learning!
I have read and edited the "Florence" stories and will be returning them (the ones I received anyways...) for students to correct this week. In fact, homework this week will be to edit and resubmit your completed and polished final draft. Please do not be alarmed by the amount of ink on some of the papers! Just work through corrections from the beginning to the end. Most of them are pretty simple and straightforward, most ask for more details and explanation. I will give students time to go to the computer lab before school daily. If I did not receive a paper, or it was incomplete, I will not edit them this week. I was very clear I needed those papers before break, it is extremely time consuming to edit those stories, I will be grading book reports this week, not Florence stories. Students who failed to get me a draft of their story, and there were many, will need to make corrections and hand in the story by Friday. Papers submitted without an edited version will be docked 5 points. Learning to hand things in on time is a very important skill to develop. Mrs. Jenkins did send me some over the break but several did not have names on them. I expect to read stories that have a clear character and setting in the beginning with all characters introduced from the start, a clearly developed rising action with a brief bit of dialog (some of these stories are entirely made up of dialog!), a clear climax or action scene and then falling action with, again, a brief amount of dialog and a sentence of denouement ("they lived happily, or not, ever after"). Vocabulary, properly used, is also a requirement. Most students are traveling in the right direction, they just took a wrong turn and need to get back on track during one of the above areas. Some of them were awesome!
The Book Report and project are due tomorrow! The 2nd book and project were student choice. There is a link on this blog called "Book Report Info" that has all the necessary info.
Report cards go home soon! Make sure you keep an eye on your students agenda. I will put any missing work in their agenda. Students may make up work but I will deduct points if work isn't made up in a timely fashion.
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