After reading a few sample persuasive essays about whether TV is harmful or beneficial, 

students were able to glean the following requirements of good persuasive essays...

After reading a few samples, this is just part of the list of possible topics brainstormed so far...

My personal favorite topic...should Disney be allowed to make any more princess movies?

Sometimes you just need to do a little warming up before writing... 

                                   

This week's book club work had the Winn Dixie group practicing visualizing a text and understanding how descriptive words and phrases in the text provided meaning. They were asked to draw a detailed pictures of the dog Winn Dixie with words and phrases from the text to use as evidence. You can see that as a group they were able to pull tons of details and evidence just from the first chapter!

This week's Tiger Rising group worked on summarizing the text and understanding what characters think and what their words mean. They were to understand the "suitcase" as a metaphor for the main character Rob stuffing his feelings. They were to draw a suitcase and write words and phrases from the text to describe the contents of Rob's suitcase.  You can see that we had some deep and mature discussions. 

Students work hard during Math Workshop to solve number puzzles using 

4 clues and real-world problems involving factors and multiples.

Conference Weeks

Conference Weeks

I feel slightly out of touch with folks because of the lack of Friday Reports during these last few weeks of Conferences, so I thought I'd put up a few photos so you could catch at least a glimpse of our work.  I enjoyed meeting with parents and students to review progress to date and set goals for students. As promised, please expect to see student goals appear on the back of Weekly Reflections in the upcoming weeks, so that students may monitor progress toward goals. I look forward to seeing these goals achieved! 

           


State Posters 

Students practice reading comprehension and deductive reasoning skills by playing Headbands with characters, settings, objects, and things people say from the book Loser.

 

 

Students work on a variety of Language Arts Workshop Tasks, including publishing Travel Essays, a comprehension book report, and reading. The last photo is a wall showing the steps we took to pre-write, draft, revise, and edit our Travel Essays.

 

 Isaiah and Silvio examine State Posters for clues for the State Scavenger Hunt.

Hug Skillin School

The Challenge Committee recently presented the whole Skillin School with a unique and fun challenge.  They wondered, if every student and staff member all joined hands around the school, could we give Skillin School a hug? This gave us the opportunity to talk about estimation, perimeter, and measurement in a real world context. Read on to find out if it was possible! So, here are some photos from the day.  Even Channel 8 was on hand to find out if it could be done. Check out their website to see photos from the event.

We did it!!