Language Arts

This past month, the week of glorious CircOrchard reigned supreme. The afternoons had the third/fourth graders wrapping up their small group work on Tuesdays, enjoyed reading and writing Chinese phrases for Chinese New Year’s, studying about the Native Californians encountering the Spanish, and while focusing on spelling through dictations and word skills contractions and complete/incomplete sentences.

Each Tuesday group wrapped up their months-long studies. Matt’s moppets wrote a final dictation and reflective writing about their spelling progress. Later, they peer reviewed each others writing, then individually revised and edited. Katy’s kids created a ‘movie trailer’ for their literature study of Bandit’s Moon, and performed their skits for their peers. After reading the playfully descriptive Willy Wonka, Liana’s learners designed a factory and created descriptive writing piece to match their design.

The children have read several non-ficition articles about the major changes that Native Californians faced when the Spanish came to California. We also worked on our map skills throughout this unit, playing “pin the mission on the map.” The articles provided jumping off points for dictations and focused our topics for the day’s class. The students continued their yearlong exploration of creating questions based on text. They have taken this skill from literature, and are now practicing applying this to the non-fiction reading. We practiced in several ways-whole group, small group, partners, and finally as individuals, less supported by peers and teacher. We broke down this questioning skills into two categories, ask your kid what each means!-

‘Actual Fact Question’

‘Critical Thinking Question’

As a final practice, the children read a mission article on their own, created their own two questions, and traded journals with a peer to answer their questions.

During these writing exercises, we focused on the difference between complete and incomplete sentences, and contractions. We played games, wrote dictations, and analyzed peers’ writing for those two word work skills.  

In this last week before break, the students working on a final non-fiction writing piece about our Mission era studies.