I swear to howdy...

I swear to howdy...Ask your kids about that phrase and they will begin telling you about the read-aloud that we just finished.  Swear to Howdy is a book about two boys growing up in the South.  It chronicles their adventures in friendship over the course of a summer and one school year.  The mood of the book is upbeat and quite funny for the first three-quarters, but then takes a dark turn when a seemingly innocent prank pulled by the boys results in unforeseen consequences.  Some of the big ideas that the book revolves around include friendship and trust.  Our next read aloud will be Hanging on to Max.

In the Miracle's Boys  unit, we just had our first quiz - as a reading check.  Most of the questions revolved around the plot and the characters to insure that we are all on the same page (pun intended).  From there we are going to continue reading - getting to the climax of the story this week.

This past week we also had some direct instruction focusing on the three big types of text structures that students will encounter (compare/contrast, argumentative, and cause/effect).  We discussed how to dissect a question and what key words to look for so that students would use the proper organizational pattern when planning an answer.  A secondary activity involved students working with partners.  In this activity, partners received one of three questions and had to first determine which type of text structure was contained in the question, and then they had to work together and actually plan an essay. Along the way I met with each set of partners to make sure they were on the right track.  I was very pleased after meeting with the groups as a vast majority of them had the correct text structure and were able to explain their choices to me.

Finally, today (Monday, Oct. 8th) I checked page logs to see where students were at with logging their pages.  Ideally all students should be at or near 450 pages this quarter.  Many students were under that page total.  Please encourage your child to keep reading around 20 minutes each night and remind them to log the pages they have read!

Have a great day!