This Month in Reading... We begin the year focusing on good reading habits. We will be setting reading goals for ourselves that include thinking about what we are reading, why we are reading, and how we are reading. Each student will participate in the 30 Book Challenge and will set goals on how they will accomplish this through the year.
Once our reading habits are established and our goals are set, we will delve into the world of characters, setting, and plot. This unit goes very well with our writing unit as we learn to connect with characters in our books, so can we write about our own characters using our reading as inspiration.
This Month in Writing... We will be starting the year off with practicing our basic paragraph structure. Each week we will be starting a paragraph and working it through to perfection by the end of the week. Once we have those basics down, we will head straight into our personal narrative writing unit in which we will be writing fantasy stories using the Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as our inspiration.
Grammar Focus: We will begin the year focusing on the basic mechanics of writing such as using capital letters properly, punctuation, dialogue and proper sentence structure.
This Month in Spelling... We will be testing the students the first week to place them in spelling groups. Homework will be required weekly after groups are in place in order for students to practice for their test on Friday.