We have been talking about Author's Purpose this week, the reason why an author is writing. Here are the basic three reasons we heard in our Flocabulary video. Double-check your notes for this information! We began in the Reading section of your ELA binder on November 12.
Notebooks are a required part of both the English and the Social Studies class. Students are required to keep their notebooks perfectly organized. Notebook grades are entered about once per week. Please review this list of requirements with your scholar to be sure that he or she gets excellent notebook grades.
Hello Baby Jaguar Scholars and Parents.
The first Accelerated Reader assessments for the 2018-2019 school year will be completed during students' media center time next week: the week of September 10. I expect that all students will do very well on AR assessments since they chose their own books. The AR test grade will be entered as a test grade. Please send me a text message or a message on Remind if you have any questions.
This is the paragraph self-check list that students will use to evaluate (grade) themselves before they turn in non-fiction writing for a grade. All scholarly (TDA) paragraphs are marked using these ten requirements. The requirements are worth ten points each.
All paragraphs (for the school year) will be marked according to these rules. Students have copied these rules into their ELA binders in the writing section. They also have written down the paragraph self-check list.
This is a student-developed scholarly paragraph sample. JR's topic specialty is how to build cars. He selected the topic "Cars" and the group question was:
Write a 5-sentence paragraph where you discuss how cars are made.
JR found that once he began adding in the needed evidence, he needed more than five sentences to fully develop his paragraph. When students begin to see that paragraphing is about supporting a main idea with evidence (not writing sentences to fill the space), their ability to write more and better improves significantly.
Here is an additional teacher model for developing non-fiction paragraphs. Students often need many examples of scholarly writing (SC Ready TDA, ACT, SAT, Collegiate) before they master it. I assign many TDA-style questions during the year and I return them to students with feedback. Please check grades to see how your scholar is progressing in writing. The writing tasks will be labeled TDA...
Homeroom Timothy's introduction to "civil war" as a concept gave us an opportunity to discuss how we respond differently to conflict according to who is responsible. Later, we will use this idea to discuss the types of conflict as they are experienced in literature. Homeroom Brisbane will cover this information tomorrow.
