Villastrigo Reading/Language Arts

Reading:

• We started off with a pretty light work load and students should have great work habits grades for coming in ready to give some good effort every day. I hope exploring learning styles and study skills was helpful to students and that they can use these techniques throughout the year. I will be integrating more study skills along the way.



• Students are creating storyboards to represent the Inca legend, Rod of Gold. This is a story that was passed down through generations to explain how the civilization's capital city and culture came to become so successful. The work I have seen in class is excellent. Storyboards should break the legend into six parts. There should be a "sixth grade quality" depiction of each part and a caption that explains the picture. Captions must be in complete sentences and be neatly written or typed. We started late last week and storyboards are due tomorrow (the exception is 4th period, due Thursday because of a late start). Students have class time tomorrow to work, but many decided to take it home for homework in order to have time to AR read.



• We read the first three chapters of Walk Two Moons and are studying vocabulary words from the book. Students learned hand signals to represent the words and will create sentences using our vocabulary on Thursday in class. Here are the words we are learning:

Chapters 1 & 2peculiar- Different from the usual or normal; odd; strange
tottery- moving unsteadily; staggering
ornery- having an irritable disposition
caboodle- group; whole bunch; whole collection

Chapters 3 & 4devour- eat up greedily or hungrily
dignified- respectable; serious; proper
gnarled- twisted and knotted, like a piece of wood or a tree
cadaver- corpse; dead body
astounding- amazing; puzzling

Language Arts:

We took a quiz over the four sentence types Monday and those will be handed back and in the gradebook this week. The quizzes I have graded so far look great! We did some extra practice with subject and predicate and will wrap that up for most students Thursday. Tomorrow we will do some creative writing, focusing on unique perspectives and setting.

New Social Studies Teacher

We are very excited that we were able to hire our new Social Studies teacher! Many of the students had the opportunity to meet her on Friday while she spent some time in Mrs. Liberty's classroom. You all should have received an email through Skyward as well letting you know about the changes. We were planning on having new schedules to hand out to students for Monday, but unfortunately we discovered a small problem with our plan. This week will be the last one for the first half of the trimester. With that comes time for progress reports. Skyward, despite it many great qualities does have it's limitations, one of which is that if you move a student to a new class their grades have to be transferred manually. With our progress reports only a week away we would not be able to get all the students grades transfered to their new schedule.

With that being said, Monday Mrs. Burger and the Purple People Eater Team will sit down together on Monday to determine exactly how we want to proceed for the next week until we can put the new schedules in place after the progress reports are completed.

Mrs. Liberty's Social Studies 9/26 - 9/30

This week in Social Studies we will be reading about the Origins of the Inca people and their Empire. We will be working with graphic organizers to help synthesize the information we read in class. Within the graphic organizers we will be focusing on the main ideas of the different sections of text and what we can learn from identifying those main ideas.

Mrs. Liberty's Science 9/26 - 9/30

We are about ready to dive into new material on the structure of Earth. Monday and Tuesday we will be reviewing mapping skills and learning about the different types of maps we will be using in this unit. Wednesday we will go to the computer lab for an introduction to the Student Center for the Jason Project that we will be using for this unit and will take a pre-test there online. Thursday and Friday we will delve into the Mission and the students will begin learning about the sea floor and how by mapping it we are able to learn how the Earth is constantly changing.

Progress Reports

It seems like we have just started yet we are already in the 5th week of school! Progress reports will be here very quickly. The cut-off to turn things in for progress reports is on September 30th. Please help your child by logging into Skyward with them to see if they have missing work or a test/quiz that needs to be retaken.

Heads up- Parent Teacher Conferences will be October 5th and 6th from 4-7.

Mrs. Liberty's Science 9/19 to 9/23

This week in Science we are completing Kid's Discover Earth magazine in class. We started it last week by reading together and going over expectations for how to answer questions in complete sentences. We completed the first few pages as a class and now the students will be finishing up with partners. I hope to have this wrapped up by the end of class Wednesday.

After we finish with Earth Magazine on Thursday I am planning to move into a short review of map skills we have already covered, which will be needed prior to starting on Layers of the Earth early next week.

Mrs. Liberty's Social Studies 9/19 to 9/23

This week we are moving from the Political Maps to the Physical Maps of South America. Each student will be expected to identify the major physical features. I am planning for this map to be due at the end of the period on Wednesday. Don't let the information from the political map disappear yet. There will be a test over the countries and capitals of South America right after Parent Teacher Conferences on the 7th of October. This should give everyone pleanty of opportunity to study for the test and memorize the locations.

Also, at the end of this week we will be starting to turn our attention to the Inca. We will start with a KWL and then move into the origins of the Inca people. We will be reading out of a book on the Inca and completing some work sheets.

Mrs. Villastrigo reading

We did a mini-unit on study skills this week.  Every student should be able to share their particular preferred learning style or styles.  We looked at two particular study techniques that all three learning styles can use well.  One is the picture method (draw a picture that reminds you of the concept) and the second was the use of mnemonic devices (ex: Never Eat Soggy Waffles, to remember the cardinal directions).  Next week we will begin reading about the Inca and start our novel.

Mrs. Villastrigo Language Arts

Great job on the sentences test!  Now we want to see you use those skills in all your classes this year.  We did some narrative studies and did some creative writing of our own.  Students told a story about one of their earliest memories.  We did a DLR test today, which will be a work habits score because it is open notebook, using the notes from warm-up each day.  We will finish a fun assignment we started today, using magazine pictures to write and identify each of the four types of sentences.  Next week we  will try a second narrative, focusing on fiction this time.  We will also continue to work to commit those four sentence types to long-term memory. 

Villastrigo Reading and LA 9/12-9/16

Reading classes:

We will be taking a reading test to determine reading level and also help to individualize personal reading goals for each student.  If all goes as expected with the reading test program, Accelerated Reader goals should be distributed by Wednesday.  Students, don't forget to read for thirty minutes each night.  If you would like to track this in your planner with your family, it may assist you in meeting this goal.  Everyone seems very excited to get started with AR!  I hope it will be a tool that helps each reader to improve in his/her skills and enjoy reading.  We will also be studying learning styles and study strategies that work best for each style.  I hope students are enjoying the novels chosen by each class, which I will read aloud at the start of the period.

Again, don't forget your homework-- 30 minutes of reading each night :).


Language Arts class:

This week we reviewed complete sentences.  We will do a final review activity and check for understanding with a quiz.  This is an especially important skill because teachers across the curriculum will expect the use of complete sentences on assignments.  We will begin to study the different types of sentences next.  Over the next few weeks, we will explore narrative writing through looking at samples of writing, as well as begin some of our own.  

Box Tops

Do you have Box Tops that you have been collecting? We are starting our Box Top campaign for the year. The Purple People Eaters have chosen to collect them as 1st period classes. Please gather them up and send them in to help us earn money that will go toward much needed supplies this year. The classes that collect the most earn extra money!

We always have great incentives for the collectors, like one pass to get out of the Ihli lap :) and the top collectors have prizes as well! Please make sure that the Box Tops are in an envelope or plastic bag with the student's name on them so we know who to give the reward to. They can be turned in to 1st period teachers.The first collection date will be toward the end of September.

Thank you all for your support in this area!

Book Orders

Mrs. Liberty's bookshelves for student checkout are looking a little bare these days so Mrs. Villastrigo has graciously given her the opportunity to run the book orders this year to try and earn some free books! The first one will be sent home on Monday. There are several ways to order: You can send the order and the money in to Mrs. Liberty just like has always been done. A second way is to order online at Scholastic. You will need to create a username and password for yourself. Then there is an account code J4JKY that you will need to type in to access the orders available through our class. Mrs. Liberty earns points with every order that she can put back into books for the classroom shelves. There are also eBooks available. Mrs. Liberty is looking into their compatibility with popular e Readers and operating systems. At this point it does not look like they have any for Mac users.

Orders will be due by Friday, September 16th.

Mrs. Liberty's Science Sept. 12-16

This week the students will be finishing up their Personal Timelines. They will have Monday and Tuesday in class to work and they are due Wednesday morning. After that we will be moving into studying the Earth's Structures. In this unit we will look at the layers, volcanoes, earthquakes, mountains, and the rock cycle.

Mrs. Liberty's Social Studies- Sept. 12-16

This week in Social Studies we are taking our first test over the continents and oceans on Monday. Tuesday we will begin moving into the geography of South America. The students will have political and physical maps to complete.

Continent and Ocean List for quiz:

Africa
Antarctica
Asia
Australia
Europe
North America
South America
Arctic Ocean
Atlantic Ocean
Indian Ocean
Pacific Ocean
Southern Ocean

Welcome!

Welcome to our blog this year. Mrs. Villastrigo and Mrs. Liberty are very excited to have each of you in our classes. We hope that this blog will be a great tool to help us keep the lines of communication open between parents, teachers and students. Please sign up to follow the blog so that you can get updates as soon as we post them.

We are looking forward to a great year!