This year we will be focusing on the following types of writing:

 

 

In addition, we will be learning effective note-taking skills, summary writing, and response to reading.

 

For our first novel study, we will be reading:

 

 

 

We have finished up our first trimester working on great short responses, responding to our novel, and composing summaries.

 

We are beginning to work on our Opinion Essay Unit. I will be walking the students through the process, culminating with a typed 5 paragraph Opinion Essay.

 

We will be working on:

 

-Opinon topic sentences and great leads

-Note-taking from sources to use in the essays

-Outlining and Organization

-Review of the Opinion Writing Rubric

-Good conclusions

-Opinion Transition Phrases

-Strong, persuasive vocabulary

-Good details and examples

-Varying Sentences

 

A lot of the time, the students will paste their writing worksheets into their writing notebook. If you'd like to take a look at the skills we are working on, you can ask them to bring it home to review.

 

We have finished up our Opinion Writing Unit and graded essays were sent home with the students. We are now starting on our Information Writing Unit. Our prompt is on Ellis Island. The students are currently collecting information and taking notes from both sources I provided for them, and from their own internet research. We have been using the safe search engine: kidrex.org.

 

They will be working on:

-Taking notes

-Researching a topic on the internet

-Finding reliable websites

-Organization

-Providing good elaboration, details and examples

-Writing to the prompt

-Continuing use of good transition phrases

-Varying sentence types

-Production of writing

-Providing visual aides

-Capitalization, usage and punctuation

 

We are also reading the novel Because of Winn Dixie by Kate DiCamillo.