Today is literacy we continued reading our class novel "Rachel Carson" and worked through chapter 7, "Fourteen Dead Robins".  The focus is now on the end portion of Rachel's life and she is now a successful writer and taking care of the majority of her remaining family.

After independent work where students focused on "author's craft" and why the author picked words and phrases to make meaning, we moved into writing.

In writing I modeled how to create a paragraph (well 3 actually) using the notes we modeled taking over the past two days.  We talked about the importance of a topic sentence.  After the topic sentence you give three supporting details that are about that topic only.   If you have more details, you can give four, five, etc, but you must have at least details to make a solid paragraph.  The last sentence should mirror the first sentence and be used to sum up what your topic was and let the reader know you are moving out of that topic. The students watched me take the notes, come up with a topic sentence, and then use the notes to make solid paragraphs.  I kept showing them how easy it was once you have a topic and notes to write solid paragraphs.

With the next class, we actually did the reverse.  We passed out "hamburger paragraph templates" and we deconstructed the paragraphs to make sure they could see the TOPIC SENTENCE, the DETAILS (from the notes), and the Concluding Topic Sentence.

Homework:

• Reading: 30-45 minutes independent reading and log
• ELA - Verb tense practice - future perfect tense
• Writing - Use notes to write three paragraphs - examples on BLOG