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Research Links for Argument Writing
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Student-Friendly Goals for Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening
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Writing
We are currently working on Small Moment Personal Narratives. We are learning these skills:
These are the grammatical concepts we are working on:
- How to zoom into a small, meaningful part of an event.
- How to write a beginning using action, dialogue, or description of the setting
- How to revise as we work, not just at the end of our writing.
- How to formulate paragraphs
- How to show, not tell, using descriptive words.
- How to add inner thinking when an exciting or interesting thing happens
- How to add dialogue (speaking) to make our stories more interesting.
These are the grammatical concepts we are working on:
- A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea.
- A proper noun is a specific person, place, or thing, and must be capitalized.
- A sentence has a subject and predicate.
- A compound sentence uses one of the following conjunctions: or, and, so, but.
Reading
Routines we are learning in reading class:
How to get lost in a book:
We are working on a character study, using the books, Drita, My Homegirl by Jenny Lombard and Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner. We are also working in guided reading groups that are tailored to our individual reading levels.
- Readers choose just-right books to do their best thinking.
- Readers use book-logs to study their reading habits.
- Readers jot their thinking in order to show comprehension.
- Readers read silently and do their best thinking while they read.
How to get lost in a book:
- Readers see, hear, and imagine themselves in the story (mental movie).
- Readers revise their mental movies as they read on and find out new details.
- Readers reread when their mental movie gets fuzzy, so they can understand the story better.
- Readers make a prediction by making a movie of that prediction. The prediction movie will show what will happen and how it will happen.
We are working on a character study, using the books, Drita, My Homegirl by Jenny Lombard and Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner. We are also working in guided reading groups that are tailored to our individual reading levels.