Star of India

This week we are sending home a packet for our Star of India overnight field trip.  We are going to be attending the overnight on Monday, April 15th.  Filling out the paperwork for going does take some time to complete but please try to return the packet by this Friday, March 16th.  If you are interested in attending on the trip, please complete the packet and return it as soon as possible since there are limited spaces available.  We will be taking volunteers on a first come first serve basis.  As always, parents are needed for driving so indicate whether or not you are available to drive.  The trip is going to be a blast and it will deepen our understanding of American History.

Last Friday we handed out the syllabus for our next project.  Please make sure the paper is signed and returned.  The first assignment was to find three sources of information about their heroes and site those sources correctly.  Some parents have been confused about the due date spaces being blank but we intentionally created that way so we can be flexible and create those with the students' input.  In the past when we had arbitrary due dates, it caused much anxiety. I will be posting the upcoming due dates for each section of the project each week on my blog so stay tuned. We are going to be starting the letters to heroes and important events timelines in the next phase of the project.  Our goal is to wrap up the entire project by the next exhibition night.

In class we have been busy this week working on our persuasive essays.  Each student is about halfway done drafting their rough draft.  Last week we spent our writing time pre-writing and planning out our essay.  Hopefully next week we will be editing and working on Google documents, so you will be able to log into your child's email and see their progress on their final drafts.

Hero Project

Last week we started a new project about heroes. Our essential question for this project is; What are the attributes of a hero and how can I be one?  Each student was asked to pick a hero and begin researching their life story.  We are planning on assembling all of the information into a book that we publish as a class.  Each student is going to be asked to join a cause or find some way that they can make a heroic change in their life.

One of the activities we are currently working on is writing a persuasive essay.  Students are picking a topics that they can persuade others to make small but significant changes in their lives.  Some of the topics are; carpooling to school, riding bikes to school, eating healthy foods, playing less video games, and working on getting along with siblings.  Our final product will be a 5 paragraph essay with a formal introduction, 3 body paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph.

Now that we have finished Holes and Island of the Blue Dolphins, we have started reading our next novels in book clubs.  In order to maintain a high student interest level, we had the class decide and vote on which books to read.  The class voted on My Brother Sam is Dead  (a historical fiction about the life of a young boy during the Revolutionary war), and Anne Frank the Diary of a Young Girl (a story of a girl hiding out in Holland during Nazi occupation).