A Short Week!

Welcome back from the Eid holiday!  I hope you enjoyed the long weekend!

Language Arts

In Language Arts this week, we spent some time organizing our supplies for success this school year.  We created some tabs in our notebooks that should help us put important information in the "right place".  We also signed into our Newsela accounts.  Newsela is a newspaper service where each article is written at 5 different reading levels.  Students can all interact with the same text, even if they are not all reading at the same level.  It will be a great tool to practice our nonfiction reading skills, meet nonfiction reading standards and have mentor texts during different units.  We are in the middle of taking the Newsela Benchmark which will help tailor their service to each individual reader.

We also launched our Reader's Workshop.  We talked about the role of the teacher and student during workshop and how it is used to meet our reading goals.  Students were given a short story by Matt De La Pena called "How to Transform an Everyday, Ordinary Hoop Court into a Place of Higher Learning and You at the Podium".  This is a piece that will need to be read and annotated by September 13th.  Students should also continue to fill out their reading log.

Social Studies

We transitioned this week from taking notes about different hominid groups to creating a podcast.  Each member of the group will have a speaking part where they will need to teach about their hominid group and also show that they are able to show the difference between an observation and an inference.  We will publish these on Garage Band in the next week or so.