20-Book Assignment

The summaries for the twenty-book reading assignment was originally due on June 1st. Ms. Short has extended the deadline to 3 PM on Friday, June 5th. No late summaries will be accepted unless a student has a legal documented absence on the 5th. If you have questions, please call Ms. Short at HW Smith.

Proud and Happy!

Ms. Short is ecstatic over the very creative projects that were submitted for the Four Perfect Pebbles project. Students went above and beyond the requirements of the project and did an amazingly fantastic job. Ms. Short is going to attempt to digitally photograph some of the projects and link them to this blog. Stay tuned!

Winner of Legacy Project

When our student teacher was here, she submitted a few student projects to a nationwide contest known as the Legacy Project. Recently, we were notified that one of our submissions was designated as one of only twenty runners up in the entire country. We are so proud of Miss Aitnajim for her outstanding work. You can read the winning submission by following the link below:
http://www.legacyproject.org/contests/winnersru.html

Reading in Literature Circle

Students will be spending the remainder of the school year reading one of the above five books in Literature Circles. Like reading in a book club, students will read their chosen book independently and then meet periodically with their group to discuss what they have read.

Four Perfect Pebbles Final Project

Students need to turn in their Four Perfect Pebbles projects on Tuesday, May 19th by 3 PM. Students are required to select three of the nine options on their Think-Tac-Toe board that would create a straight line either diagonally, vertically, or horizontally. If students have misplaced their Think-Tac-Toe guidelines, they should see Ms. Short ASAP.

Reminders for Checking Grades

Remember that if a student would like to check his or her grade, he ro she should go to www.mygradebook.com. Each student will need to know both the username for his or her class and individual password to sign in.

The usernames for each class are as follows:
Period 1 - ELA7P1
Period 4 - ELA7P4
Period 5 - ELA7P5
Period 6 - ELA7P6

If a student has forgotten his or her password, he or she needs to see Ms. Short.

20-Book Assignment Reminder

This just a reminder to all students that their 2-book assignment is due by June 1st, 2009. Students were required to read twenty books throughout the school year writing a one-paragraph for each. Many students have been submitting summaries throughout the school year. However, some students are still lacking the required number of books read. Please remember that this assignment will account for 50% of each student's homework average for the fourth quarter. If you have any questions, please contact Ms. Short at kshort@scsd.us.

Please note that the assignment has been reduced from twenty-five books to twenty books.

Introducing Literature Circles

As students continue to read "Four Perfect Pebbles," they are learning about the roles involved in effective literature circles. Literature circles are like book clubs where students read the same book and get together on a weekly basis to discuss it. Students read the way people in the real world read a book - highlighting interesting or important events, discussing difficulties in the text, and making connections between the text and the world. Students are learning the five main literature circle roles:

- Passage Master
This person is responsible for finding interesting, important, or difficult passages for the group to review.
- Illustrator
This person summarizes the main events of the text in pictures. The illustrator can also bring in maps, graphs, charts, etc. to help the group understand certain aspects of the text.
- Questioner
This person creates questions for the group to discuss. The questions created might have a definitive answer or they might not.
- Connector
This person creates connections between the text and other texts, the text and him or herself as well as the text and the world at large.
- Word Wizard
This person selects words in the text that are particularly important, interesting, and/or difficult. This person helps build their group's vocabulary through words in the text.