Most of us who grew up a few years ago remember one of the rites of passage in high school as learning to write a five paragraph essay. Well, school has become tougher and students are more or less expected to be able to do this in fourth grade now! But the great surprise, to me at least, is that with a little help they can do it .
We used our experience of going to the Stunt Ranch to help us learn this skill. We started out with the body of the essay. This makes sense after you’ve written a few of these, but to the students the idea that they would be writing paragraph 1 after they had already written paragraphs 2 and 3 seemed just plain wrong!
The students did a pretty good job with the introductory paragraph. I explained to them the difference between and topic and a thesis sentence, and they nodded as if it sort of made sense to them. I am sure we will talk about this many, many times again in the coming months. The concluding paragraph seemed a little easier and more straightforward to them.
Other than that, we put together folders for tomorrow morning, read a chapter of Island of the Blue Dolphins, and went to the library. I allowed the students to start on the homework as soon as they finished the final paragraph, and most of these young scholars had much of their homework done by the time they left the room.
Again, please try to make the Back to School Breakfast and stop by our classroom tomorrow. There will be a very, very short presentation and an opportunity to talk about your child’s progress.
Homework: (1) Do pages 76-77 in the math book. The handout has the wrong page numbers here, but we talked about this in class. (2) Do the “The Coast” study sheet. Students will need their history books here.
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