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.