Students have been laying the foundations for their 6th grade year in ELA and Geography.

In ELA, we:

• Reviewed important roots and challenged students to notice words with these roots as they read their SSR books this year. They will get paid when they find them as part of our Roots Scavenger Hunt!
• Reviewed sentence structure and will practice constructing interesting, 6^th grade sentences (with subject, predicate, direct objects, prepositional phrases, adverbs, and adjectives) during a warm up each week.
• Reviewed literary genres and practiced identifying the genres of books in the classroom library.
• Reviewed paragraph structure and applied it to the writing of book reviews. These should be completed for the SSR books students complete.  They are rewarded with a hillbill for each one completed, but a minimum on two per quarter are required for their grade.  The first Book Review is due November 4.
• Reviewed Spelling and Vocabulary Strategies- roots, words within the word, dictionary skills, context clues in sentences. Students will identify the vocabulary we have learned all year in the context of the books we read.

Next up, a review of figurative language and literary devices that authors use in their writing.  Then we will identify these devices as they are used in the books we read over the course of the year.  We will be reading the novel, The Witches by Roald Dahl during the month of October.

In Geography, we have:

• Reviewed oceans, continents, and major parallels on the world map including the tropics, the Equator and the Prime Meridian.
• Discussed the five themes of geography and determined what theme different geo topics would fall under.
• Practiced using a grid system while playing Battleship. Students then applied this experience to using latitude and longitude coordinates to locate places on the world map.
• Used GPS coordinates to locate a hidden object in the school yard.
• Practiced logging in to the online geography book and reading a lesson and completing comprehension questions online.

Next up: Using Map Scales, Landforms/Water Features, Climates.

 

Silhouettes with haikus the students wrote about themselves are up!  Be sure to check them out at Parent Teacher Conferences on Thursday, October 13!