Staying In-the-Know
with Mrs. Drayton
Dutch Fork Elementary The Academy of Environmental Sciences, Title I
11.7.19
VIP Folders & Reminders
- weekly work
- progress report (please sign & return)
- Thanksgiving Luncheon flyer
- PTO Night flyer: Brussels Gymnastics
- Book Talk, due tomorrow, Friday, November 8
- Veteran's Day Parade and in-class recognition, Monday, November 11
- NO Early Release Day next week, Regular School Day on Thursday November 14
Book Club: Mini-Inquiry
Wrapping up our Analyzing Themes Unit
- monitoring our thinking for meaning making
- annotating to record our thinking, wondering, and inferences
- responding to texts (verbally and written)
- noticing plot elements & importance
- identifying theme & why it matters
Our goal is to form our own book clubs that will be completely student-led and student-monitored. In order for your reader to be a successful member of a book club, we are looking to have members who have stamina (which means they will do ALL assigned reading), annotate thinking (which means they are prepared to share), and is willing to push themselves in a conversation about a text.
At home: Perhaps you want your reader to lead your family in a family book club! If you only have one copy of a book, make it a shared reading experience first! You can talk out your thinking together. Reading together is a great way to help your reader grow and work toward new goals. If you want your reader to grow his or her vocabulary...be word detectives together! If you want you read to be able to summarize a text....discuss what was most important from you reading! Try to build in some time to read together. It doesn't take much time to see how the small shifts can make a big difference.
Informational Unit: Drawing Conclusions
Our first lessons have been focused on determining main ideas (explicit & implicit) while reading. We are asking ourselves:
- What does the author want me to understand?
- What is this text mostly about?
At home: Consider the informational texts you read at home. I bet you and your reader will be surprised how much informational texts are part of your everyday life: magazine articles, blog posts, news articles, data in the form of infographics and charts.
Building our informational texts book baskets!
Environmental Fair
Ask your environmentalists what concerns they have int he world and how they hope to make a positive difference. This should spark some great conversations!