We're coming up to the midpoint in the first grading period, and interim progress reports will be issued soon for students who are in danger of getting less the proficient grades in any of the main academic areas. You'll read more about that soon. It also means we are coming to the end of the first theme in Open Court.
I've had two major goals here. First, I wanted to introduce the students in a very structured way to the major reading strategies. I worked hard on this so that we can ultimately reduce the amount of time spent on OCR, and devote at least two days of the week to literature circles. The second goal was to give them a sense of fiction and nonfiction as distinct genres, and particularly to understand the predictable structure of most stories. I am less sure that many of them really understand this, so it's probably a goal which we will pursue in some form for most of the year.
We are working on a fantasy story now to help get a sense of this structure. This is the major homework students have for this weekend. They need to plan a story with some element of conflict which gets resolved during the course of the story, and to develop and describe characters who will do this in a particular setting or settings. We are incorporating Thinking Maps into this process - a bubble map for setting, a tree map for the characters, and a flow map for the plot - and writing a rough draft.
I'll let you know how the first drafts look on Monday or Tuesday. We'll probably have to do extensive revisions in the second drafts, but I hope that by the time they are finished with this they will not only get the idea of story structure and fantasy as a genre, but will have a nice little illustrated book as well.
Home Studies: (1) Do the prewriting and rough draft of the story as described above. (2) Finish the math packet if possible.
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