Picture for week of September 13-September 17

This week we played a "Musical Chairs" writing game to help our transitions from ideas. We also learned about people who have and do not have integrity and the difference between an inference and an observation.

Week of September 13 - September 17

Can you imagine being arrested for giving water to thirsty people?  This week, we read an article about someone who was arrested for littering after leaving bottles of water in the desert so that people immigrating into the United States wouldn't die of thirst.  This is an example of a situation in which it is hard to decide if a person has integrity or does not have integrity.    Each student then found their own example of a news story that exemplied someone with a great deal of integrity or very little integrity.  Our text for this week was the short story "Thank You M'am" by Langston Hughes.  It told the story of a young boy with little integrity and the woman who  helped him learn right from wrong.   We learned the difference between observations and inferences, which is something that many of us are also discussing in our science classes.  Our class also became authors when we played a musical chairs writing game to work on transitioning from one idea to another. 

Week of 9/6-9/10

This week we covered the use of Mel-Con paragraphs. The Mel-Con organization is used to properly quote evidence from text as support for a topic. We used a graphic organizer to put together a paragraph using quotes from “The Necklace” by Guy De Maupassant, and typed it up. On friday,we discussed the meaning of integrity. We agreed that a good definition is people have integrity when they are able to distinguish right from wrong, and able to make good decisions.

Picture for week of 9/6-9/10

This week we learned the proper use of quotes and wrote a characterization paragraph. The paragraph is based on a character from the short story

"The Necklace" by Guy De Maupassant. To help us with this paragraph we used the T-Charts that we made. An example of a quote from my paragraph is, "'I'll retrace our steps on foot', he said, 'to see if I can find it'" (167).

Picture for week of August 30 - September 3

We used "My Life in a Paper Bag" as a way to get to know our classmates. Each student brought in, and presented, three items that they felt described them. We learned about hobbies, childhoods, families, cultures, and more. It was great to see that we have things in common with each other that we didn't even know about.

Week of August 30 - September 1

Our week began with presentations of "My Life in a Paper Bag" from each student in class.  It was a great way to get to know some unique and surprising things about each other.  As the week went on, we wanted to be able to summarize events in a story, but we weren't sure if we were including too much (or too little) information, so we learned a quick and easy way to formulate our summaries! Following the Somebody, Wanted, But, So format (used in the previous sentence), we summarized the events of the short story,  "The Necklace", written by Guy De Maupassant. On Friday, we visited the Fremd Media Center to hear about some great books and select one (if we hadn't already) for our independent reading projects.