Sunday, September 22, 2013

Taking a Break from the Basal

What a year it has been thus far! With this new reading series, Journeys, I have felt as much like a student as your children have. These new standards are demanding and rigorous, but I can see that my students have more than risen to the occasion.

That said, when planning this week, I ran into a challenge along the way. Due to a technological speed bump last Monday, our Thinklink Reading test had to be rescheduled for Thursday, September 26. We were previously locked in to take the Math portion tomorrow. With both assessments being quite time-consuming, I calculated that I will lose roughly three hours of instructional time this week.

Instead of trying to cram four days' worth of Reading instruction into two, I have deemed this week a review week. There will be no testing this week (other than the make-up Reading test Tuesday; see the latest newsletter for details). We will work on concepts that perhaps not everyone grasped the first time, such as nouns, conjunctions, complete/incomplete sentences, rounding, expanded form, etc.

Additionally, we will begin our Cinderella unit, which I have been planning for the past few weeks. We will be reading different Cinderella stories from around the world and comparing/contrasting them (Don't be fooled by the glass slipper, boys. Cinderella isn't a girl in every story!). Topics of discussion will include (but will not be limited to): social hierarchy in 1600s France, language (learning how to say common words/phrases in Afrikaans, German, French, etc.), the shifting donor role throughout various versions of Cinderella (e.g. the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, the bull in The Irish Cinderlad, the crocodile in The Gift of the Crocodile, etc).

We will be writing from various perspectives (example: writing a thank you note to the bull from the character Becan in The Irish Cinderlad). Also, we'll explore the theme (message) we can infer from reading these iterations of the classic tale.

Finally, we are going to explore the meaning of the phrase "Cinderella story". This will lead us into next week, when our story of the week is a true rags-to-riches/Cinderella story about Roberto Clemente, the first Latino baseball player to win a World Series as a starter.

As always, students should continue to read for thirty minutes each night (uninterrupted).

Happy Reading!

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