December 05th, 2016

Reading:
Unit 2: Reading the Weather, Read the World

• Students finished up their reseach for Bend III. We will be focusing on the four primary standards to teach students how to respond with their own ideas and thoughts while synthesizing their facts through their research.
  
• Students will also learn how to develop new ideas through this comparative analysis to develop a kind of "field of study" rather than a specific area of focus.
  
• Students will be doing some rigorous work in this last "Bend" of the unit. They will be keeping track of new terms in their journals developing a word bank, setting up a way to take notes in a structured capacity, and then writing their thoughts and ideas they've gained from the new knowledge by using sentence frames from their "Push Your Thinking" charts.
  
• Homework this week will be light...
  • Monday - Thursday: Continue research and note-taking on new topic, read 20 mins
    
• Lucy Learning Progressions for Bend III:
  • Main idea and supporting details/ summary
    
  • Analyzing parts of a text in relation to the whole
    
  • Analyzing author's craft
    
  • Cross-text synthesis
    

​Language Arts

• Students will be given a new WWW this week on Tuesday, with a quiz on Friday.
• As a grade level, students will complete two Weekly Word Works in as many weeks, then will have a quiz on the Friday of the second Weekly Word Work.
• Skills continuing to be reviewed are:
• Progressive verb tenses
• Using quotation marks
• Figurative Language
  

Writing: 

• We are still working on our second unit, Opinion Writing, in the Lucy Calkins Units of Study for Writing! The students are now moving from a personal piece to a persuasive piece! The personal piece was helping them receive exposure on different strategies to write a great opinion piece, and the persuasive one will be used for their final end of unit assessment. While the Units of Study bring in lots of Language, Speaking and Listening, Reading, and Writing standards, the main Writing Standards we will be working on are the following:
  • 4.W.1: Write opinion pieces on topics or texts, supporting a point of view with reasons. 
    • A. Introduce a new topic or text clearly, state an opinion, and create an organizational structure in which related ideas are grouped to support the writer's purpose. 
    • B. Provide reasons that are supported by facts and details. 
    • C. Link opinion and reasons using words and phrases (ex. For instance, in order to, in addition).
    • D. Provide a concluding statement or section related to the opinion presented. 
  • 4.W.4: Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development and organization are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience. 
  • 4.W.5: With guidance and support from peers and adults, develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, and editing. 
  • 4.W.6: With some guidance and support from adults, use technology, including the internet, to produce and publish writing as well as to interact and collaborate with others. 
  • 4.W.8: Recall relevant information from experiences or gather relevant information from print and digital resources; take notes and categorize information, and provide a list of sources. 
  • 4.W.9: Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research. 
  • 4.W.10: Write routinely over extended time frames and shorter time frames for a range of discipline-specific tasks, purposes, and audiences. 
    

it.