What's new in Room 8?

Our focus in reading right now is on story elements:  character, setting, and plot.  Students are learning to use a character's words, actions, thoughts, and feelings to determine character traits.  When your child is reading at home, ask them to tell you about the main character in their book and  have them support their ideas with evidence.  Engage them in discussion about whether or not they like the character and why.  These types of discussions about reading truly help to boost comprehension.

In these photos, students are reading a short story with a partner and coding the text clues to determine information about the main character.  You will find this short story and the activity sheet in this week's Friday Folder.

Next week we will be learning about story setting.  The setting in our classroom read aloud, The Wild Robot, is crucial to the story and how the events unfold.  Students will get an understanding of how story setting often impacts story character and plot.  Again, talk to your child about this when they are doing their nightly reading.

As I mentioned in last week's entry, students are now up and running with Google Classroom.  This week, students practiced making a Google Doc.  Students are just learning how to navigate the tool bar, so being able to set up a document is a big job!

This afternoon, I assigned students the task of creating their very own Google Doc through our Google Classroom.  Everyone was successful in choosing a font, centering a title, bolding and underlining text, listing sentences and numbering them, and then submitting the document back to me successfully.  My hope is that once everyone is comfortable with this process, we can begin doing some homework assignments through Google Classroom.

In writing, students have been working on their second personal narratives as well as a spooky story for Halloween.  Many students have finished the final drafts, and you will find copies in this week's folder.  If you don't see it, your child is still finishing and it will come home next week. 

You will notice that the narratives have a great deal of detail and some nice dialogue as well.  These are skills that we have been working on in class - how to "stretch" a moment by providing lots of detail, using dialogue in just the right places to create interest, replacing boring verbs or adjectives with more sophisticated choices.  Many students were feeling pretty accomplished this week, and I'm pretty proud of their efforts!

Happy weekend everyone, and as always, thank you for all you do at home to support your child's learning!