Wednesday, September 16th, 2015 - Happy Wednesday!

It's the middle of the week, and it's a good time to catch up on some of the work that we have been doing in class lately.  We have been busy creating and adding to our ELAINs and our SS notebooks, and I think today would be a good time to organize and catch up a little bit.

In ELA, we have been doing several things.  Yesterday, the classes took time to write a Persuasive essay.  The topic of this essay was "Do kids need their own cell phones?"  Each student was given an article from TIME for Kids that addresses this topic.  Their task was to read this article and then answer the question in a persuasive essay.  In order to write an effective essay, the students were required to cite evidence from the article to back up their answer.

TIME for Kids article

Persuasive Essay Prompt

We also discussed the literary element of Characterization yesterday by doing a close reading of text from My Side of the Mountain. Students were required to look for examples of Sam Gribley's character through the events in the story.  They had to cite the text example, and then make an inference about how this text example illustrated something about his character.

Our next element that we will be discussing is going to be Plot. To do this, we'll start by kicking it old school with a look at Goldilocks and the Three Bears to give us a simple example of plot elements such as Rising Action, Climax and Resolution.

The Plot Pyramid Diagram that we'll be using.

In Social Studies, we are still plugging away with the 5 Themes of Geography.  This is where both classes will be playing catch-up today.  Our SS Interactive Notebooks are a little sparse, so I'm hoping that we can plump them up today!