Number the Stars Spelling/Vocabulary on Quizlet

We are about to begin our exploration of WWII through the novel Number the Stars by Lois Lowry.  To prepare for this novel unit, students are researching the setting of Denmark in geography and building background knowledge about the war through video and non-fiction resources.  This background knowledge will provide a scaffold on which to build their understanding of the events and the characters’ feelings and motivations in the story.

In addition to text based spelling and vocabulary activities and assessments, students will create a graphic novel version of the book as their novel based project.  Students will be assigned chapters and tasked with choosing the 8 most important events to depict and convey in the very concise graphic novel format.

Students are also practicing interacting with the text by making predictions before reading each day.  These predictions are on their blogs.  Ask your 6th grader if their predictions panned out!  🙂

In geography, we are finally ready to apply all we have learned about climate, land forms, and the elements of culture to actual places in the world.  We start with Northern and Southern Europe.

During the month of October, students explored the use of figurative language and dialect in Roald Dahl’s classic novel, The Witches.  They also learned text features of the drama genre and are “showing what they know” by writing a script for an emergency news broadcast.  These news broadcasts will be filmed and edited and viewed in class as the final project for the Witches novel.

In geography, students are wrapping up their unit on climate and land forms by planning a trip that would allow them to visit ten different land forms/water features and writing a fictional journal about what they saw.  Their journal can be a traditional written journal or it can take the form of a “vlog,” video log, or they can put their information into a Powerpoint presentation/prezi.  An example of one day of the trip might look like the following:

10/29/16  Today I visited the Grand Canyon! It looked like the whole Earth had been split open and the wound was a mile deep and many miles long. Layer upon layer of colorful rock could be seen all the way to the bottom of the canyon. The landscape was dry and baked- probably because it’s in a desert climate.

The travel journal/vlog/Powerpoint is due on Friday, 11/4.

Student’s first book review is due Friday 11/4.  Students can take a book review form anytime in class, or you can check you email for an electronic version of the form which was sent on September 16.