Well...that's it.  School's out.  It's tough to believe that the three weeks are over already, but they are indeed complete!

My thanks go out to the students who had wonderfully positive attitudes towards being in school for an extra three weeks this year - I hope you enjoyed the activities we did in the classroom.  Thanks to the parents who emailed or stopped in to chat to let me know how it was going from their point of view.

There is still plenty of time left for the rest of summer - I've put a few suggestions at the bottom of their reports for how to help your children continue with literacy building over the next month and a bit before they go into a new grade.  

If your child was not at school today, the reports are being sent to the school board office in order to be mailed directly to you.

Thanks again for making this an excellent experience!  I wish everyone a happy summer and all the best in September!



Adieux, 
Ms. Handel

We did a bunch of 'wrap up' activities today!

With only two days left, we completed the class novel of The Tale of Despereaux today.  We found out who lives happily ever after!

Time was given today to peer-edit the four haiku poems rough drafts that were due today.  Once we had three clock buddy sessions, I had students come over so I could check their work for them.  If they needed to add a syllable to the line, I gave them a '+' mark with however many syllables were needed...likewise with too many syllables, they got a '-' mark with the appropriate number of syllables.

Once we wrapped up with that activity, I gave the class time to work in their readers' theatre groups.  We have two groups performing tomorrow as some students will be absent the last day of summer session.

After recess, we gathered up the library books to send back to the library, then we finished the rest of the class novel!


Homework:
- Despereaux chapters 47-52 questions and vocabulary
- Haiku corrections (good copy starts tomorrow!)

Today we worked on full sentence answers - we went over a sheet together and looked at which words to pick out of a question in order to fully answer a question.  We will be having a test on this in a few days.  I went around to check on students' examples from the morning exercise and asked them to use it as an example/notes for their upcoming quiz.

Busy, busy, busy!

Plenty going on in the classroom today!

"More homework?" groaned the class.

"More homework!" cheered the teacher.

I couldn't help myself - I enjoyed last week's 'Said it Dead' assignment.


Today we handed more work back for students to organize in their binders, then we had a pop-quiz sentence dictation.  Two sentences with a focus on homophones and apostrophe usage:

1) Despereaux's brother threw him through the door into the dungeon.
2) The king declared all rats outlaws.

One of the common mistakes I see these days (in any classroom I go into) is the misuse of homophones and apostrophes.  These are one of the grammatical themes we have been working on in class.  I remind students that an apostrophe is not added to make something plural (his shoe's =/= his shoes), but is used to show either a contraction or ownership of an object:

• Dave's baseball cards. = The cards belonging to Dave.
  
• He can't come out to play. = He cannot come out to play.
  

Once we marked the two sentences, students had time to do their corrections then silently read while I checked on progress.

The remaining time before recess was given to finish up with the homophone booklet that was started yesterday. 

After recess, I read chapters 29-33 of Despereaux and students had the rest of the day to work on the questions and vocabulary that goes with it.



Homework:
- Homophone booklet 
- Despereaux chapters 29-33 questions and vocabulary

Busy, busy day as usual!

Today we worked on getting the marked assignments back where they belong in our binders.  Plenty of things to put away today, let me tell you!

I have been noticing a number of commonly misspelled words as I see the assignments roll in, so we had an impromptu spelling test today with words from the class novel as well as some more 'everyday' words.  The 'real' test will be this Friday.

We marked the homophones worksheet that went home as homework and had time for corrections afterward.  

Some time was given to enjoy those books they got out of the library yesterday!  If students had corrections to make from their spelling tests, they were asked to use this time to do so.

We also began a homophone booklet today - only the first few pages were due (more fill-in-the-blank with the correct answer kind of assignment).

For Despereaux we read through five chapters (FIVE chapter?!) and answered questions and vocabulary words to go with it.  In truth, it's eight questions and four vocabulary words.  We also learned about the early life of the character Miggery Sow.


Homework due for tomorrow:
- Homophones booklet pages 47-50
- Despereaux chapters 24-28

The big excitement for the day was that we were able to go to the library and check out books.  It was great seeing everyone so jazzed about getting something to read!

It's that time again!  I don't know about all of you, but I think Mondays are the hardest days after a weekend of sunny weather!

Today:

Boggle starter - we had 16 random letters up on the board and made as many words as we could with them.  I think the record was over 100!

Synonyms booklet - we worked on this for about an hour before recess.  We went through the sheets together and had time to ask questions about the assignment.  There are 6 pages in total that are due for tomorrow morning: one multiple choice page, and the rest are fill-in-the-blanks with the synonyms.  We discussed how to look up words in both dictionaries and thesauruses to try to find the meanings to the words given to us.

Textbooks...again - I brought in a few textbooks from my university days to show the students that the textbook features are pretty much universal.   We compared our list of textbook features from the ones we 'walked' through on Friday to the ones I brought in today.  The features listed in the previous day's blog...are all there.  Some students were pretty surprised! 

Despereaux - we began the second book in the novel today and read through chapters 16-19.  Plenty of vocabulary words today and we met the villain of the book!


Homework due for tomorrow:
- Synonyms booklet (we will mark this in class)
- Despereaux chapters 16-19 questions and vocaulary