Watch this space for a weekly update of all of the English classes in grades 5-8 and eighth grade reading, religion, and spelling.

JANUARY 4-8, 2010
    
RELIGION-8   After reading about the Christmas season, we will dive back into our unit on sacraments.  This week's chapter focuses on the Bible connection for our first three sacraments of Baptism, Reconciliation, and Eucharist.

SPELLING-8   Unit 18 is a review unit!  Yippee!

READING-8    We are delving into THE GIVER.  After an interesting discussion of freedom vs. security, we worked on the vocabulary definitions and will read the first several chapters.  The students will receive a chart where they will keep the definitions of some interesting terminology that the book uses.  Of course, we will discuss each chapter thoroughly before doing our comprehension questions.

ENGLISH-8  We will do at least one more edit of our personal narrative, get it into perfect form for the Language Arts Festival and JR. HIGH WRITER, take our personal narrative test using our book and notes, and jump right into Unit 13 on phrases.  This chapter will hand us some real challenges as we tackle preposition, participles, gerunds, and infinitives.   But we will be SOOOOOO smart next year in high school English class.
 

ENGLISH-7   We are beginning work on our story for the Language Arts Festival.  Using the SmartBoard, we will review some of our skills from last year such as grabbers, setting, main characters, problems or challenges, using dialogue, and building action.  By the end of the week, we will be ready(hopefully) to write the first draft of our story.    The autobiography outline we completed in class has been saved on my classroom computer.  If any of the students needs to doublecheck anything, they are welcome to come in anytime.

     
ENGLISH-6   We will work on lend, borrow, teach, learn, let, and leave, complete a review in our book, study using exact verbs, and begin preparing for our verb unit test next week.

WRITING WORKSHOP-6 Students will work on ideas for their Language Arts Festival story.

ENGLISH-5   After reviewing contractions, the fifth grade will study be/have agreement and regular and irregular verbs.  We will also complete a mini-review in our book.  

 

WRITING WORKSHOP 5-  Brrrrrrr!  It's cold!  We are working on a special writing assignment where we show(not tell) how cold it is.

 

WRITING WORKSHOP 4-  Brrrrr!  It's cold.  We are working on a special writing assignment where we show(not tell) how cold it is.