The students completed some excellent book covers and book reviews for their literature circle books that are currently displayed in the hallway. I’m very proud of all of the students for working so hard on this final literature circle project. We have spent the last few weeks talking about argumentative writing. The students have seen different examples of argumentative essays and have been able to identify the author’s claim, reasons, support, counterclaim, and rebuttal. We also discussed transition words and how to support your claim with textual evidence. The students then chose the topic they wanted to write their own argumentative essay on. We started researching and filling out our graphic organizers for planning our essays last week. We will be continuing to complete the graphic organizers this week so the students are able to start typing up their rough drafts the week after Earth week. We also began reading our new whole class novel “Hatching Magic” this week. The students received a packet with comprehension questions and vocabulary words for each pair of chapters in the book. We are using a Google Doc in the Google Classroom to complete definitions and meaningful sentences for each vocabulary word. This book is unlike many of the other books we’ve read this year because the setting goes back and forth between 13th century England and Boston, Massachusetts 2002. It’s a fantasy book about a wyvern looking to lay her egg in a safe spot and a special portal that transfers her into very different time periods. Ask your student about the characters we’ve met in the book so far.
