November News...
To culminate our short story study in Readers' Workshop, students created FlipBoards for a variety of short stories, to reflect their knowledge of plot, setting, theme, and character analysis. We have begun to apply MCAS open-response questions to typical short story passages, in an effort to practice our analysis skills with MCAS strategies. Students shared their Independent Reading Bookmercials, based on their written critiques, and are currently working though self-critiquing these videos.
Our Writers' Workshop unit on Personal Narratives produced some great stories, which we have been sharing and peer-critiquing in class. Although students have received grading rubrics for both FlipBoards and Narratives, these projects will stay in class as part of their portfolios.
During RW, we will be moving into Historical Fiction Literature Circles. Students will be reading & discussing a variety of HF novels. They will independently read in class, meet 2-3 times a week, and set group goals for these books. Our new Read-Aloud will be Dan Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea, which is a nonfiction narrative tracing Dan's journey to build schools and futures throughout Afghanistan. We will also be looking at a number of nonfiction narratives in the Literature Anthologies, in order to immerse ourselves in that writing genre.
During WW, we will continue to develop our narrative skills. Students need continued strategy work on the elements of narrative, in preparation for the Long Composition section of MCAS. To work further on these skills, especially "writing from inside the story" and "developing dialogue", we will be writing Nonfiction Narratives in conjunction with our historical fiction Lit Circle novels. To expand our audience base, we will be sharing these with 8th grade audiences.
Word study warm-ups continue to center on vocabulary development and grammar lessons. As we conclude our nouns lessons, we will move into a unit on verbs. Our vocabulary and grammar lessons each culminate in different forms of mini-assessments.