It's about time!

Well, I had certainly planned on blogging more often than once a month -- and hopefully I will have a better track record in the future -- but I forgot how busy the beginning of the school year can be. We've established procedures and routines and begun the slow, sometimes painful work of remembering what we've already learned so we can figure out what we need to hit hardest this year. The good news is that I finally feel confident that I know each of my 90-some students by name (first, if not last) and quite a bit about them. Because reading and writing are, in essence, the sharing of ideas, we do likewise in class everyday.

I had hoped the students would be publishing to their own blogs by now, but real life never works out quite like we'd have planned, right? For starters, the number of laptops and iPods available is slightly less than the number of classroom teachers who daily request them. In other words, it's "take a number" right now where technology is concerned. Also, until students have been issued their own google accounts -- something scheduled for later this fall at the earliest -- they can't blog anyway. I've been fortunate to get computers some last week and all this week, though, and we are hitting our descriptive essays hard. Hopefully I'll have some sample student work for you soon! As I see my students describing their favorite objects and wrestling with the juicy stories about how these became their favorite objects, I'm realizing what a neat bunch of kids I have. It'll be worth the wait!

In reading, we are working hard on context clues. Students have learned that ways to find the meaning of unknown words in a text include: 1. taking a careful look at the surrounding words and phrases; 2. looking for antonyms (words that mean the opposite of the word in question) and synonyms (words that mean the same); and 3. locating definitions -- often offset by commas -- nearby. Understanding and utilizing context clues will be a big part of the Reader's Journey test, sometime mid-October. It helps that, at the same time, we've also been reviewing root words and studying suffixes (ize, tion, and able). It's fair to say that decoding words is getting easier as our reading tool belts are becoming heavier.

This week, we're also adding literary elements such as setting (time + place), characters, plot, and conflict to the mix. Specifically, we'll be looking for these elements in some historical fiction about Japanese internment camps. Beforehand, we'll gain some background knowledge of this unpleasant piece of American past. Because my students are generally sensitive and intuitive, I'm betting they'll have lots to say about these texts. You'll have to ask them what they've learned!

There's never enough time in the day, it seems, but we are making good progress overall. My goal is to get through the material needed for our first round of assessments early so we can spend some time on review. Skills in reading and writing are not so different than those gained anywhere else -- like in sports or music. It takes practice. Making sure your kids are reading at home will help them practice reading skills, of course, but also make connections to the writing process. All in all, it'll be time well spent.