The Middle Grades had a great first week back! We dive/dove/dived deep into the parts of speech, simple sentence structure, and how nouns and verbs change in relation to singular/plural and past/present tense.

There were some fun moments. The students made a card game a la Go Fish! but used vowel sounds instead of numbers. And music laughter erupted when we played this game..... you might want to play too!

Designate a queen, a king, a prince, and a prince.

All say: Who? What?

The Queen calls out a noun.

All say: what kind of (noun)

The Princess calls out an adjective.

All say: What does the (adjective)(noun) do?

The King calls out a verb.

How does the (adjective)(noun) (verb)?

The Prince calls out an adverb.

All say the whole sentence.

We have music on Monday and Tuesday this semester. Please help your child remember to bring their instruments on those days. We will be practicing the recorders every morning, so they should be staying at school during the week. Students who have a ukulele or a violin should bring them on Monday and Tuesday. Once we have gotten settled into the new semester there will be things they need to practice.

On Tuesday we will begin reading Charlotte's Web as a class. I will be giving assignments for them to read silently as well as out loud and will be evaluating for fluency and comprehension. When we have finished the book, we will write a book report together, since by that time we will have talked about writing good paragraphs. After we write this one together, additional book reports will follow the same format, and they will be assigned approximately every three weeks.

When we begin the Human and Animal block, each student will be assigned the task of writing a report on an animal. More details will be coming.

Have a great week!