Take a Peek at Our Week!

In Individuals & Society we focused on interactions between our expert explorers and the natives they encountered on their journeys. Students shared their research through a "chalk talk". "Chalk talks" involve students communicating only through writing. They can respond to questions, build off of each other's answers, and change/deepen their thinking on a topic. Students identified positive and negative interactions, made inferences as to why negative interactions occurred, and also extended their thinking on the topic by determining what could have been done differently to avoid negativity. So many insightful responses!!! This activity hits our ATL foci for our current Lang & Lit and Individuals & Society planners; COMMUNICATION and THINKING!

In Lang & Lit, we continued our work with making inferences as we read. This week, we focused on longer articles and sharpened our annotation skills by writing our inferences directly on the text to help deepen our thinking or figure out something that was not directly stated by the author. This was another opportunity to hit our ATL focus-THINKING! The students took a short formative assessment on inferences at the end of the week which was sent home for your reference. Next week we will focus on point of view and analyzing multiple accounts of the same event/topic. 

We completed our second informational essays on student-selected topics! We peer edited our work on Friday and even used Google Translate as a way to further check our pieces. I will give students feedback using our informational writing rubric next week. We will also discuss areas that need further editing/attention based on the rubric as a way to prepare for our informational writing assessment! 

The New Year has brought another commitment to our class-setting individual weekly goals on Mondays! We discussed how writing goals down and keeping them visible all week helps us to hold ourselves more accountable. We checked in on our progress on Wednesday during our class meeting. Here are our first goals from the week:

Have a great weekend!