Tuesday, November 13, 2012

The Kitchen Sink for the Week of 11/13/12


Readers’ Workshop
Our work empathizing with characters is taking a slight shift this week.  Previously, our focus was “becoming” the character, creating mental movies and connecting emotionally to characters.  While this is, and will always be important, we are now working to grow ideas and theories.  Our work begins by recognizing that a character’s actions are a window into the sort of person he or she is.  With our work in Second Step, we have developed our ‘social intelligence’ that basically means the ability to read people well, to glean what they are thinking and feeling.  We are applying these skills to the characters in our books.  Later this week, we will work to identify portions of the text where a character behaves strangely, and instead of thinking, “That’s weird,” we will work to consider possible reasons for this out of character behavior.  What could be the motivation behind this change?  Has something changed or were our previous ideas about a character simply too simplistic.  
Characters – like people – are not just one way!

Writers’ Workshop
We will continue working on strong closings that explain what happens to the main characters and resolve the problem.  Beginning Wednesday, we will start the editing process, going through each of the letters in our editing acronym:  C.U.P.S. (Capitalization, Understanding/Does it make sense?, Punctuation, and Spelling).  Ask your child how their draft is coming along?  Where are they in the writing process?  Have you visited the blog with them lately to take advantage of the writing samples featured online?

Skills Block
Students will be tested on spelling List 10 this week.

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