Tuesday, 4/18/17

 What a beautiful day!  I cannot believe that we have only 5 weeks left of classes.  I was told not to mention it again... it makes the kids sad!

Today, both groups continued their vocabulary, handwriting, and spelling studies.  They will be finishing up with their last vocabulary list in the next couple weeks, and we will be using that time for a special project! 

The Cow Group has been working through their Signatures book both in class and at home.  This guided reading will give us the opportunity to work not just on reading fluency, but on comprehension and analysis, as well.  Today, the students worked on finding the main idea of an article.  Then, they highlighted the sentences that they believed supported the main idea.  This was the first time most of them had ever heard of this concept, and they did a fantastic job!

The Guinea Group has been reading the book, The One and Only Ivan.  We will be walking through this book together, step-by-step.  In order to encourage them to think deeper, they have been working on journal entries with each at-home reading.  We discuss their responses, diving into the real meaning behind Ivan's words. Today, the students learned about personification, which was new to each of them.  I'm excited to see them opening up to this new material! 

In history class, the students have been learning about William Shakespeare.  So, Mr. Jim will be spending a couple weeks on the Shakespeare for Kids version of A Midsummer Night's Dream.  The students are very excited about this!  In writing class, the students have been working on writing their own very short play, which will tie right in to their Shakespeare study. 

Both groups are wrapping up their grammar lessons for the year!  We will continue to review the parts of speech (and diagramming for the Guinea Group), and we will combine their grammar review with the work they are doing in reading class.  For instance, the Cow Group diagrammed selected sentences from their Ivan reading.  we will continue to review concepts from grammar through to the end!

In science class, we have begun the Life Science unit.  Last week, the students had an overview of biology and the five kingdoms of classification.  Today, we made Biology Mini-books.  The class will be using these mini-books at home and in class to collect information on each of the five kingdoms.