Thursday, November 11, 2010

Fiction. Finally!

I've been itching to get rolling with fiction this year. Looking back to last year, it was about October that I pulled out our reading textbook to use. I used it in conjunction with our social studies text, but never really carved out a niche for either. The result was a bit muddled, and felt disjointed. I'm sure it wasn't as effective as I'd hoped.

This year I decided to stay with the social studies text a little longer. We rolled from a geography primer into a Native American primer (environments, migration, and cultural regions). We'll wrap that up tomorrow with an assessment, moving us onward to fiction. For me, that is a fantastic development.

Our reading block should be fun. We'll read a snippet (15-20 pages) from Earthquake Terror by Peg Kehret. We'll work on making predictions, as well as inferences (since they are so similar). We'll also work on structures of writing, as some are sequential while others are by main idea. We'll also get a chance to start using our FQR sheets to record important events, saving some work for when our novel study begins. Therein is the real rub. All of this starts to point to our novel study units to come, which the kids really enjoyed last year. We were able to analyze characters and have discussions about literature. To me, that is an exciting development.

Hooray for tomorrow!

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