Our Week at a Glance
Week-at-a-GlanceSept. 29-Oct. 3, 2008
Starting Assignments:Starting assignments are generally used as a time of review. Most of the time these assignments are reviewed in class after a majority of the students have completed the assignment. All starting assignments should be kept in the yellow Starting Assignments folder.Monday will be our community meeting day. We will review our procedures and discuss changes that should be made to optimize our learning time. Each subsequent day will be a review of non fiction text structure learned during Language Arts the day before. See text structure information at: http://www2.scholastic.com/content/collateral_resources/pdf/r/reading_bestpractices_nonfiction_fiveTextStructures.pdf
Vocabulary:Last week we began to explore our Academic Vocabulary. We will continue to dive deeper into more of our Academic Vocabulary. Our new words for this week are main ideas and details. These will be our 5th and 6th Academic Vocabulary words to be included in each student’s Academic Vocabulary Folder.
Reading: We will continue reading the fiction book, The Fairies of Nutfolk Wood, in efforts to better understand the elements of fiction. We will focus on the strategies of summarizing and sequencing to deepen our knowledge. This book is an AR book that can be tested on once we have completed reading it. It is recommended that students read and test on an AR book in their reading zone weekly. AR scores will be calculated and recorded in the grade book by October 10th.
Language Arts/Writing:Non fiction text structure will dominate our time in Language Arts this week. Students have homework in this subject Monday-Thursday of this week. The story they will be working from is titled, “At the Bottom of the World.” Each night students have a specific activity relative to the story to complete. It is imperative that students not work ahead! This assignment will be turned in on Friday. We will be working on identifying text structure this week. See the link above in the starting assingments area.
Social Studies:We continue to learn about early explorers this week. Our focus will primarily be on the Spanish Explorers and their settlements in America. We will be utilizing a new tool to help identify the main ideas from each section of text that we read. We will learn how to pull out the gist from our text and how to summarize the information for future reference. Our explorers cards will serve as an extra activity to reference the information about the early explorers. Our weekly objectives are:
Starting Assignment: Analyze text structure from non-fiction passages. Identify each text structure and supply evidence to support the findings.
Vocabulary: Formulate the meaning of words within the Academic Vocabulary realm.
Reading: Evaluate a fiction text by summarizing and sequencing sections as they are read.
Language Arts/Writing: Gain exposure to non fiction text structure. Learn to properly identify the 5 main text structures.
Social Studies: Trace and analyze expeditions of Spanish explorers. Describe the purpose and accomplishments of each explorer’s journey.