Welcome back!  I hope everyone had a restful February vacation.  As your students may (or may not) have told you, we kicked off our Iditarod Unit this week by viewing Iron Will as a whole grade.  Students are completing an Iditarod Scavenger Hunt on Chromebooks in school (and at home if they were unable to finish during their allotted class time) in order to learn more about this historic race.  We will be following the race in school when it kicks off on March 5, and will complete interdisciplinary activities in all classes that tie in with this topic.

This week in ELA, we finished up our reading of Number the Stars, the story of how Denmark saved almost all of their Jewish population during WWII.  As a wrap-up, students watched the video clip about Sir Nocholas Winton and his efforts to bring almost 700 Czechoslovakian Jewish children to safety in the UK before Hitler’s “final solution” was able to be implemented.  Students each received a short bio of a child from the time of the holocaust to read and reflect upon with the purpose of creating a small tribute to the child.  These tributes can be in the form of words, pictures or a combination.  They are due Friday.

Next week, we will look at the autobiography of Leon Walter Tillage who grew up in the American South in the 50’s and 60’s amid discrimination and then the Civil Rights Movement.  We will also compare and contrast Jim Crow Laws to Nazi implemented rules for Jewish residents of the countries they occupied.  Students will receive a vocabulary list for the unit and will be tested on those words on Thursday February 11th.

Title your blog post: Predictions About Number the Stars

*In complete sentences tell:

What do you think the Title Means?

What do you think the cover illustration is showing?

Predict what you think the plot of this story will be.

The title of Chapter 1 is “Why are You Running?”  Predict who is running and why.

Should be completed by Monday 1/11 when we will begin reading the book.

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.

At this point in time, students should have finished typing their MarsONE essays on their blogs.  We will revisit these essays over the course of the year as we discuss and explore ways to improve their 6 Traits of Writing: Ideas, Sentence Fluency, Organization, Word Choice, Voice, and Conventions.

We have now moved on to a dramatic reading of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.  As students read for the characters as they speak, they really get to know and understand the conventions of using quotation marks.  As we read, we are working on a literature based vocabulary and spelling list which can be found on quizlet.com by searching the key word hillbills.  The test on this vocabulary list will be this Friday, December 18.

As a culminating project for the book, students are creating a set of twenty “Trading Cards.”  These should show the students understanding of the literary elements of character, setting, and plot for the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  The directions for this project are linked below.  These trading cards are due Tuesday December 22, and must be handed in for the student to be allowed to watch the movie on Wednesday before we head into the Winter break.

LWW Project Trading Cards

When students return from Thanksgiving break, they will be working on drafting their MarsONE opinion pieces from the T-charts which were started in class and should have been completed at home as necessary.  Students must have their T chart completed in order to use the Chromebooks next week to publish their essays to their blogs.  The form can be found below to print and complete at home as necessary.  I hope you all have a wonderful few days with family!

Mars One T Chart for Essay

Today in class, we discussed the anatomy of sentences.  Students have notes stapled into their notebooks where they are to complete tonight’s assignment.  They should choose one sentence from each body paragraph (big idea paragraph) of their Hollywood essay (written for last night’s homework) and rewrite the sentence two different ways using the steps we went over in class today.  An example from one class is included above as a reference.  Students who have both last night’s and tonight’s homework completed will be able to go on their blogs to publish their essays tomorrow.

Students are writing their first multi paragraph essay to answer the question, “Why does “Holywood” change stories when making movie versions?”  They are using differences they noted between the book and movie versions of the novel we just completed to support their answers.  To help them write their first drafts, we organized our ideas in T charts.  To change  the T chart into the first draft students should follow the following format:

Intro Paragraph: 2 Sentences long- 1)Explain that the Witches was a book that was made into a movie, 2) Copy “thesis” or sentence from top of T chart where we turned the question around.

Paragraph 2: Body paragraph- 1)Turn big idea 1 into a topic sentence. 2) take each bullet from right of T-chart as supporting details  3)Wrap up paragraph with a clincher

Paragraph 3: Body Paragraph- 1)Turn big idea 2 into a topic sentence. 2) take each bullet from right of T-chart as supporting details  3)Wrap up paragraph with a clincher

Paragraph 4: Body Paragraph- 1)Turn big idea 3 into a topic sentence. 2) take each bullet from right of T-chart as supporting details  3)Wrap up paragraph with a clincher

First drafts are due in class tomorrow.  Once we edit these first drafts, students will publish their essays on their blogs.