Though report cards have not gone out yet, we are beginning our new nine weeks today, and I will do my best to enter grades in a timely manner. We are working very hard each and every day.
In Writing, we did some work in stations last week. It was a difficult week to get that done as we had only 4 days and one of those was a field trip. It's ok, though. We did some review and finishing touches today. This week we are just reviewing stations, but we will be working on our new writing composition...the expository. We've been learning a lot about the expository and read/analyzed some mentor pieces in order to learn about the components of great expository writing. As we did with the narrative, we will work on a graphic organizer in parts throughout the week.
We've been continuing to update our writing notebook each week with new grammar lessons as well as new lessons in spelling. Last week we focused on plurals (3 rules). This week we will add to that with some new rules for plurals.
In Social Studies, we have completed our reading and note taking of the 10 Native American tribes we are focusing on in Texas. There certainly were and are others, but our studies revolve around just 10 this year. It's important that the students glean as much information as possible during this unit so that as we begin to learn about the explorers who first met these natives, they will have a better understanding of the troubles everyone faced. This week we are analyzing the tribes for similarities and differences. I'm encouraging students to design questions they have regarding what they've found.
I've added a separate page for this nine week's Social Studies extension. GT students in S.S. or Writing, should work on this assignment at home and during free time in class. All others are invited to do this extension as well. Please look for the S.S. Extensions tab at the top of this page.