As the Understanding Character Unit came to a close, projects analyzing a character from book read by your children came in - and they were, as a whole, wonderful! There was some pretty high level character analysis coupled with high levels of creativity to be found.
We are in-between major units at the moment working on a new writing piece. One of the Common Core Standards for Language Arts involves analyzing a work of literature that has been adapted either for film or for the stage. In class we just finished watching a movie version of the short story "Flowers for Algernon." Students took notes on the similarities and differences they could identify. This week everyone identified three major differences and completed a graphic organizer as pre-writing to aide in analysis of why a change was made and if that change was effective. We are then going to be turning that preliminary analysis into a more formal essay. Our writing focus will be on structure - well-developed and interesting beginnings, solid paragraph structure (topic sentence, supporting details, concluding sentence), and satisfying conclusions that are not redundant.
Our grammar focus is going to be on how to identify and eliminate the various types of run-on sentences. Students will be given some sentences that contain run-ons, and then they will see the corrected versions. I will have the kids working in groups looking for patterns in the grammar and then coming up with the rules surrounding run-ons. Once they can clearly articulate the grammar rule, each group will develop a guide to help identify run-ons during the editing process.
The next major unit of class will focus on setting. I know when I was in school, setting was simply a term we had to define - the time and place in which a story occurs. Now we look at setting on a much deeper level. In class we will discuss three dimensions of setting - the physical setting, the temporal setting (time period and time lapse), as well as the psycho-social setting (rules governing behavior created by the setting). In addition we will look at how these dimensions of setting affect characters, plot, and conflict.
As we enter the third quarter, remember to keep checking in on your son/daughters reading page logs. That assignment is recurring every quarter so students should keep logging their pages.
