Language Arts

Our focus has been sharing our Immigration Projects, writing Halloween spooky stories, and practicing cursive.  

It was so fun and interesting to learn about your family's immigration story. The children were very engaged in the sharing process. While they listened to a peer present, each student was required to practice note-taking.  This is a yearlong focus for our eldest group to support their transition to middle school. I have been guiding the students in how to organize their notes for various activities.  

For the immigration project, the listeners organized their notes by capturing the presenter's name, country of emigration, and questions/comments about the presentation.  

The children love writing spooky stories!!  We are moving through the various steps of the writing process. Even those kids who want to just dive ahead and get down their story, are being shown how to slow down to make sure the content captures all the story elements. To ensure this, the students have been using a pre-write guide. This guide contains all the story elements we have reviewed, and has space to organize adjectives/descriptions for their story. We are even using this pre-write guide as a post-write tool to ensure we have captured the elements to the author's satisfaction. We have just begun this revising process, and will have our stories complete by next week. 

Our cursive practice books have arrived! Each student has their own official book. While we still are practicing handwriting with our bodies, chalk, and tracing with fingers, we now can apply those skills into our practice books. I've even noticed an improvement in their print. Interestingly, many of the students had lowercase "p's" that stood atop the lower line. By practicing a lowercase cursive p, I was able to talk to the children about all lowercase "p's" being a "descending letter-like a monkey tail!"

Today, 10/24, the students took home a "magic c" cursive game. I encouraged them, and you to play!