We are finished with our narrative writing unit! What does this mean? It means we're on to "Responding to Fiction," a unit that will blend our LIT class and LA class very nicely. Beginning Wednesday, we will be reading Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse. This will be a read-aloud novel in class, as we only have enough copies for a class set.This unit will lend itself to great questions for our reading journals, and text-supported evidence for our writing prompts. This is a fairly easy novel, written in prose, but we can extrapolate many meaningful lessons from it. This is part of the WEX curriculum, and we are adding to this unit to make it fit our new Common Core Standards as well.
In addition, students will be starting grammar warm-ups and root word warm-ups. We will do these at the start of each class. We will focus on one sentence a week for our grammar warm-up exercises, and one to two root words per week. We will treat them both as puzzles for us to get our brains working right away!
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI found your exciting blog through your comment on "Books in the Middle," and wanted to let you know how impressed I am with what you're doing with your students. I'm a former teacher, my husband is a retired college librarian, and one of our daughters is a middle-school librarian. I also am an author of books for children and would love to offer a free Skype visit to your students. This past spring, I Skyped five times with a class of sixth graders as they read my most recent novel, published in 2011. If this sounds interesting, please let me know.
Thanks,
Sheila
www.scbwi-illinois.org/Welch