After the National Day holiday...

Good morning!

I hope everyone had a lovely 5-day weekend.  My family spent some time in London and enjoyed the cold weather and seeing Aladdin on the West End.  Here's what we've been up to since we got back:

Language Arts

In Language Arts this week, we launched our Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends unit.  In this unit, we will be looking at different types of cultural story telling and how they reveal a cultures values while also identifying archetypes, stereotypes and social issues within a text.  There are no formal books to be taken home this unit.  Instead, students are asked to read books of their choice at home and I will check in with them about those books at various points.  

This week we talked about what makes fairy tales, myths and legends different from each other and made a Venn diagram to show our thinking. We also defined archetype as a "typical type of character found in a story".  We looked at familiar archetypes and started to identify them in the stories we are reading.  We also looked at the role that culture plays in how archetypes are portrayed.  Next week, we will put our archetype skills to the test by watching a documentary called "Wonder Women! The History or Female Superheroines".

I also introduced our next writing piece which is going to be family folklore.  Students have been asked to interview one or more family members in order to get some family history.  They will then take that history and create an expository nonfiction piece (a nonfiction piece that reads like a story).  Those interviews need to be completed by the end of next week.

Social Studies

In Social Studies this week, students have been working diligently on their Animaker projects.  They are making an informational cartoon based upon the research they have done about Ancient Egypt.  They also need to answer one of our essential questions that have been the foundation of our class discussions.

Drama

Students shifted to a new Wheel class this week.  I now have a new group of students.  We have started the class by creating Theater is... posters where we define what we think this genre of performance is/is not.  We will revisit these posters over the course of the trimester to make changes or add things.  We will be talking about different jobs in the theater and will also begin talking about stage directions.

It's Been a Few Weeks!

Between Parent/Teacher conferences and Discover Oman, it has been a few weeks since I've posted.  Here's what we've been up to:

Language Arts

In Language Arts this week, we took time in the revising/editing phases of the writing process to make changes to our essays.  We looked at the feedback from Mrs. Kuti as well as our peers to guide our work.  We also used checklists and rubrics to remind ourselves of expectations.  During this work time, I offered optional mini-lessons about in-text citations, transitional phrases and paragraph reasoning for those students who wanted clarification.  

Next week we will be celebrating our hard work with some bonus read aloud and giving each other "Golden Tickets" complimenting our writing craft.  We will then start our nonfiction unit on Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends after the long holiday.  This will be paired with an expository nonfiction piece about Family Folklore.

Social Studies

Students were introduced to their next project, an animated cartoon, using research on an Egyptian topic of their choice.  Students will need to link their topic to either religion, science/technology or art.  Students spent this week researching and paraphrasing the information they have found.

Drama

In Drama this week, students reflected on the puppet performances they gave to the Kindergarten students.  They reflected on their puppetry technique, collaboration as well as overall performance.  We then started our last mini-unit of the trimester about theater critique.  Students are watching Newsies, the movie from 1992 and Newsies, the musical from 2016 and comparing/contrasting these performances.