Genesis: Complete book talk synopsis.  Prepare for your book talk.  Continue independent reading and working on children’s book.

Legacy/Explorers: Continue independent reading and writing.  Sign up on the wiki and try posting to your page.

Genesis: Students continued their independent reading and writing study through workshop.  During co-teaching minilessons with language arts teachers, we went over workshop expectations and book talk guidelines.  Students were pulled for differentiated minilessons on using text evidence for claims and developing second-order support for connections to text.  We also continued our parts of speech/grammar study with adverbs and practiced this identification skill.  This was our last week of using workshop time for our children’s book publishing.

Legacy/Explorers: Students continued their independent reading and writing study through workshop.  In reading and writing minilessons, we studied the criteria of our nonfiction project rubric through whole group reading and discussion of several nonfiction text excerpts from longer works–”Consider the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace, “The Pain Scale” by Eula Biss, “The Search for Marvin Gardens” by John McPhee, and “Why Mother’s Day?” by Garrison Keillor–as well as two eighth grade student nonfiction examples.  Students worked on letters to the editor/author in response to their choice of editorials.  Students also received reading and writing workshop rubrics to assess performance in both learning settings; our first summative assessment will be December 17.  Official co-teaching reading with Ms. Heller begins next week for Legacy students–Ms. Heller and I are thrilled about our upcoming plans!

Genesis X Block: Welcome to X Block!  Our new X Block is informed by Boston University’s Favorite Poem Project curriculum.  Our unit goal is to find a favorite poem and be able to tell the story of why we love it.  After student input, we developed a list of our “poetry territories” and have begun our study of animal and sports poems.  We saw some great poetry tableaux performances and discussed our connections to images in the poems we read.  Stay tuned for the anthologies of poems read in class.  Your son/daughter should read their favorite poem from the week to you this weekend!