Fifth+Literacy+Archive

Week of October 4, 2010

﻿ Greetings from Room 203 at Berthoud Elementary School!

This week during our literacy class we began our journey into shared inquiry experiences through Junior Great Books. We read and discussed the first story "The No-Guitar Blues". The class developed an extensive list of questions they had about the story through their shared readings. We focused on identifying the higher order questions from their list; those which require inference and deeper connections to answer, as opposed to questions which apply basic knowledge and comprehension skills. These questions provided great opportunity for discussion! We are also working to develop our writing skills each week. We will be evaluating our individual progress through the use of the "kid-friendly" rubric. This process will allow the children to monitor their own progress as developing writers throughout the year. Spelling is also part of our literacy class. Each week, we visit the website savethewords.org to adopt an endangered word. This word is recorded in our binders and a different team creates a t-shirt with the word's meaning to hang on our clothesline in the hall. The kids should be using these new words in their conversation and they are also bonus items on our spelling test each week. This week I made a spelling "bargain" with the class: Eight students mastered their words for the week on Wednesday's pretest. (If your child was one of those, you received a high-five email from me.) The bargain? If eight more of them mastered their words on Friday, then we could watch a video on Tuesday of next week. That video that they are clamoring to see is from my skydiving adventure last summer. Looks like we'll be watching my hands being pried off the airplane door at 10,000 feet since nine more students received 100% or better on Friday's test! There will be an informational meeting for everyone interested in Odyssey of the Mind on Monday, October 11 at 6:30 in our classroom. This program is a great opportunity for your gifted child to build thinking and collaborative skills in a fun environment! Thank you for your help and support and for sharing your special child with me! Regards,Ms. Mac


 * Week of 11-1-10 **

Greetings from Room 208 at BES!

Our literacy class is a busy place! We have been working on many activities to help us master our first round of Wordmasters Challenge words. Those words will also be incorporated into our weekly spelling list, along with our adopted words from savethewords.org. Our next phase with the Wordmasters words is to study the complexities of analogies and how these words fit into different kinds of analogous relationships.

We are in the process of reading //The Bat-Poet// in our Junior Great Books. We will be completing the story this week, focusing on the inferred meanings within the poetry written by the bat and character analysis of the animals in the story who interact with this unique "poet".

Weekly Reader newspapers provide us with opportunities to explore current events and apply a variety of reading skills each week. There is an interactive version online that the children can access with a "secret word". Check out the awesome resources available for more in-depth information on current topics. We are so lucky to have such a great variety of materials available to us.

The class is an amazing group of students and I am fortunate to work with each one. Thank you for sharing your special child with me!

Regards, Ms. Mac