The Middle kids are learning all about life in Colonial America. Our students enjoyed writing in journals as if they were traveling to the New World in the early 1600s. They faced a great deal of hardship, including suffering through many storms on the ship, eating stale, rotten food and drinking beer! We will now now explore life in the colonies as our students experience school at that time and move on to a study of the original thirteen colonies. As we move through this unit the students are considering our essential question which asks how historical events influence our lives today.
In writing workshop we will begin a unit on opinion and persuasive writing. The middle kids have a lot to say so this is a great opportunity for them to be heard. They will learn how to state their opinion and support it with good reasons. We will then move onto using their voice to create a persuasive paragraph. In reader’s workshop we will be writing book reviews of some of our favorite books as we continue to work on reading more fluently and with deeper understanding of the story and characters. For those students in our book study group, this will be our last week. These readers will have a little bit of extra homework, but they will have two weeks to complete it. We will talk to them more about this tomorrow at book group.
On Friday Middle Kids will be presenting their Science Share projects. Please make sure the yellow sheets are filled out completely by then. Students will tell about their experiment, what happened and what they learned. We do not want them to read everything on their sheets, so its a great idea to help your child practice his/her presentation. Some kids bring in photos of the experiment or even the experiment itself if it’s easy to do that. If your child has created a display board for the Science Fair, he/she can bring in that to share. We are excited to see all the cool experiments.