Drawing by Julia Butler 🙂

Our team is currently starting a service project where we will collect old iPods and mp3 players from the school community in order to load these devices with songs for people residing in local nursing homes.  This project was inspired by our discussion of the importance of music in our lives.  The attached video shares how music from days gone by provides a quickening to nursing home patients- activating centers in the brain and giving them renewed energy and abilities.

https://youtu.be/IaB5Egej0TQ

If you have an old device laying around unused, please consider sending it in for our project!  Thank you for considering!

We will be kicking off the new year by exploring WWII through non-fiction reading materials combined with our next novel, Number the Stars.  To build background knowledge about the novel’s historical setting (the when), we’ll be watching a short video and then we will use Chromebooks to research the physical setting of the novel (the where) which is Denmark.  We will continue to study vocabulary and consider story elements such as character, setting, plot, and theme as we traverse the story together in class. Students will complete several blogging assignments over the course of the next three weeks and practice the following literature circle roles:

*writing succinct summaries of chapters

*creating and answering higher level thinking questions

*locating literary devices such as simile, metaphor, personification, etc. within chapters

*identifying then clarifying and using difficult vocabulary from the story

*making connections between the story we’re reading and our everyday lives or other things we have read and talked about in class this year

Finally, in the spring, students will enjoy a performance of the play, My Heart in a Suitcase, and make connections to our reading and discussion of the second World War.