Week 6 Update

This week we were ahead of Mr. Aichele's class in Social Studies, so we took a break before starting our unit on Ancient Islam and spent the whole week focusing on reading and writing in English.

First, we finished our discussion of the six signposts for fiction writing and analyzed chapter 4 of Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key looking for all the signposts. We also practiced our analytical writing skills and wrote several "CER" (claim, evidence, reasoning) paragraphs - we focused on writing arguable claims, finding good evidence, and writing reasoning that analyzed our evidence and really showed our critical thinking skills.

In preparation for next week's Pop-Up Debate, we read a great Pro/Con article from NewsELA about whether or not the Olympics should have a permanent home. In addition to working on close reading skills by answering text-dependent questions about the text, students also wrote a CER paragraph where they took a side on the issue. Their work on that paragraph will set them up for success in next week's debate!

We also launched our English unit on Lois Lowry's The Giver. Even students who have read this book already or have seen the movie will really benefit from the structured assignments and discussions we will do with The Giver; we will be using this whole-class novel to practice the type of talking and writing about books that we will be doing all year long.

Finally, we explored the Express & Reflect purpose for writing by writing 6-word and 140-character memoirs. You can see some of the great student work here.

A few other reminders:

• Progress reports will go home next week.
• My WELL (office hours) is from 12:30-1:15 on Wednesdays. 
• This week is the last week for students to turn in late social studies work before we move on to the next unit. 
• Book orders are due by the end of the month
• Sign up for Remind! (Period 1/2 or Period 4/5)