October 26, 2018

The fifth graders are thrilled to be presenting Where the Wild Things Are as their one act play this year. Eighth graders Teddy, Zach, and Alison are leading them on this adventure as they rehearse their lines, work on improvisation, and design the set and costumes.

 

The sixth graders have been practicing close reading as they make their way through The Lightning Thief.  Each time they read, they annotate the text, and they are developing deeper thinking by making predictions, asking questions, making connections, and noticing the author's craft.

 Here, students choose one of their notes to think about more deeply through writing. 

 In religion class, the fifth grade students are learning about the Sacraments of Initiation, beginning with Baptism.

 Here, Andrew sequences the rite of Baptism.

In grade 5, students read "Can't You Make Them Behave, King George?" by Jean Fritz.  
They made claims about the author's tone and found evidence from the text to support their claims.

Grant uses a graphic organizer to collect his evidence.

 Here is Zayda's organizer, complete with parenthetical citations.

 Students then developed their ideas in paragraphs.

As you can see in Garrett's draft below, the students are on their way to becoming strong academic writers.

Jean Fritz uses a humorous tone in “Can’t You Make Them Behave, King George” which makes the reader’s experience more enjoyable. First in the title “Can’t You Make Them Behave, King George” she is emphasizing that he just got beat by a small army and she is using a sort of humorous tone to get the reader’s interest at the beginning of the story (359). Next king George says “Yes you all picked it up yes, yes, yes, yes, all, all, all, you all picked it up” (364) which makes him sound like a turkey as she says in the story. Lastly, Jean Fritz says “And for the queen's amusement he has a zoo consisting of one zebra and one elephant”(365) she is making fun of his zoo consisting of two animals. Soon after the Americans had won their independence and the King announced it and he had lost some of his empire.