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.