Thanksgiving Week and End of Trimester One

Language Arts

In Language Arts this week, we celebrated finishing our essays!  We spent some time reading the essays of other classmates and leaving them "Golden Tickets" with specific, evidence based feedback for the writers.  We also launched our next unit: Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends which will be paired with Family Folklore (Expository Nonfiction).  We looked at the difference between the three types of cultural storytelling as well as noticing elements that they have in common with one another.  We will start looking into the archetypes within fairy tales next week.

Social Studies

This week in Social Studies we continued using simulations to draw connections with Ancient Egypt.  We discussed our pyramid building simulation from last week and set up an economic simulation which took place yesterday.  Students were farmers, craftsmen, merchants or transport workers.  The Nile flooded which produced a certain harvest, which was then taxed by the Pharaoh.  Students then used their extra profit to barter with the merchants and craftsmen.  We will discuss next week how dependent people of Ancient Egypt were on the Nile.  Its level of flooding directly impacted their daily lives.  We will then look into individual topics to do some research on for our next project.