The last day!

Prepositions

Remember Prepositions? That song, you learned in Writer's Workshop? Yea, you still need to know Prepositions for Language Arts too!

Prepositions

(To the tune of Yankee Doodle)

about above across after

along among around at

before beside between against

within without beneath

through

during under in into

over on off to toward

upon near for from except

by with behind below down

Text Codes

Immigration Unit

Find the documents you need for your particular book on the blog by looking at the top menu and selecting the name of your book.

Homophone Review

Fourth Quarter!

Welcome back!

Our first week back has been busy! We are beginning Unit 5 in our Vocabulary Workshop workbook. In addition, we are touching on a Black History Month Project that was pushed back a few weeks due to additional snow days and a few extra days to complete our Tuck Everlasting unit project.

 We discussed bias, prejudice, and perspective in class and students were assigned an African-American Inventor to research. We will spend two days in the library researching our inventor and then will write a few reflections in a journal format reflecting on what we've learned. The goal of this project is for students to experience the difference in material available on individuals who lived many years ago and reflect on how bias, prejudice, and perspective of people during that time period may have impacted the amount of information we have on these inventors in addition to the scarcity of written records and technology during the time.

We will be finishing up this activity next week!

Run-On Review

Please review how to correct run-on sentences by re-viewing Ms. Shahani's video. It is posted on her blog but I attached a link below!

Ms. Shahani's Run-On Video

The final days of February

This week we have been nearing the end of Tuck Everlasting in class. In furthering our discussion on characterization and inferencing, we have been working on our compare and contrast paragraphs in which we compared and contrasted two characters from Tuck Everlasting. Next week, we will quiz over Ch. 9-16 vocabulary, characterization, and the metaphor "A Ferris Wheel is a wheeling calendar" which we discussed thoroughly in class as well as created a visual representation of the comparison. Next week we will also be finishing Tuck Everlasting and talking about larger themes present throughout the novel as well as our final culminating project over the novel. After finishing our Tuck Everlasting unit, we will spend some time celebrating and remembering Black History Month.

To help you study for your upcoming quiz

Click here to visit Quizlet Ch. 1-8 vocabulary

Ch. 1-8 Review
Ch. 1-4 Review
Vocabulary Crossword and Key

Shortened Week- MLK

This week, we continued our study of Tuck Everlasting. For most of us, we began looking at the author's use of foreshadowing to provide us with insights into where our story is going and what might happen next. We continued our study of vocabulary words in the context of TE and introduced Metaphors. We will later identify metaphors in Tuck Everlasting, but for this shortened week we talked about what metaphors are, why they are used, and how they are similar and different to similes. I attached a link below to a video we watched that is a fun way of seeing how similes and metaphors and similar, yet different.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoSBVNUO2LU

Example of Foreshadowing-- our "fun" discussion

Within our discussion of foreshadowing in literature, we also discussed foreshadowing within movies. We discussed how music can foreshadow events about to happen in a movie or the personality of a character (Cinderella's evil stepmother for instance). Pixar is also known for including foreshadowing within their movies that hint what might be released in the future. Below is a picture I showed the students.

Monsters Inc. was released two years before Finding Nemo however Pixar places Nemo in the movie to foreshadow the future Finding Nemo movie release. The students did a great job discussing other hints they've seen within Disney/Pixar movies--- Wall-E in garage in Cars, the car in Toy Story being the same car in Cars, Woody and Buzz laying in a landfill in A Bug's Life, the setting of Frozen being mentioned as a nice vacation spot in Tangled… the list goes on!

January 14-17

     This week we really had a chance to dive into Tuck Everlasting that was introduced last week. With a shortened class period on Monday, we reviewed "Prologue" and the purposes an author has for writing a prologue. Then we worked on illustrating a specific passage from the prologue to help us visualize different events Natalie Babbit introduces to us in the prologue as "three things [that] happened and at first there appeared to be no connection between them" (pg. 3). Visualization is a key concept throughout our discussions because it is one the many reasons why an author utilizes different literary techniques and figurative language in his/her writing. We will refer to our illustrations frequently as we uncover the apparent connection between these events. Below is a picture of the example illustrations I had a chance to hang.

      After moving on, our classes have taken a more organized approach to the novel. We start each class period with a journal question per usual and take a few moments to discuss various responses to the journal entry. Then, students are introduced to the lesson topic for the day. This week we've focused on the different literary terms personification, simile, foreshadowing, and introduced metaphor (in two class sections). We've written down the meaning of these words as well as a general example. After introducing personification, we together read Ch. 1 and 2 and our purpose for reading was to identify examples of personification within the chapters. After reading, we together identified numerous examples of personification by highlighting and labeling them as such. We ended the class by discussing the plot events that unfolded through the two chapters. Similarly, simile and foreshadowing were introduced, discussed, and identified through our reading as we continued through Chapter 4 of Tuck Everlasting. 

Next week we will review metaphors diving into a discussion on the metaphors within Tuck Everlasting. I also hope to introduce symbolism to the students as we continue reading up to Chapter 8 in the novel. 

2014 Begins!

We are back and starting the second half of 5th grade! I am excited about the quarter ahead and have great expectations for what is to come. We began the quarter with two snow days and a short week, but we managed to fit a lot into two class periods this week. We began by discussing what a "resolution" is as we hear this word frequently at the start of a new year. Each student made a resolution related to school that they could work on throughout the remainder of the school year. We then refreshed our writing and reading memory by writing an organized paragraph answering the question "What if you could live forever?" and discussed what is "setting" and "genre" to get us thinking about topics our upcoming novel, Tuck Everlasting, presents. We learned about the word PROLOGUE and continuing our discussion on Author's Purpose, we listed five different purposes an author might have for including a prologue in his or her book. We read the Prologue to Tuck Everlasting and briefly discussed it. We are working on annotating and thinking as we read for a purpose so you may see their books marked up with ink!

Next week we will start the week off with taking Natalie Babbitt's words in the Prologue and applying them to a visual representation. The students will be assigned small parts of the Prologue in which to illustrate so that we can visualize the prologue and set the stage for the beginning of the novel. We will refer back to these pictures when we reach the Epilogue at the end of Tuck Everlasting. Afterwards, we will read and discuss the next few chapters as well as develop their vocabulary. We will be introducing various literary terms such as similes, metaphors, personification, symbolism, foreshadowing, etc. as we read and analyze the text. The students will be challenged to inference and analyze beyond basic comprehension.