Short Story Selection for Read to Someone

You will be required in the next coming days to select a partner for your Short Story assignment.

A bin of short stories written for children and for teens has been selected.  You are NOT limited to this bin, and I would challenge you to find your own short story. 

I have not vetted all of the stories/content of these websties, so you are encouraged to view these documents with an adult.  Ask an adult about their favourite short story, including those geared for children as those too have rich, deeper meaning, which will help in your presentation.

American Short Stories

Enotes.com Essential Short Stories list

Work on Writing

Students this week will have knowledge on all five Daily 5 activities.

Work on Writing is being introduced this week.

Now that you have all 5 Daily 5 activities, how you use your time in class to complete assignments will be extremely important.

More information on your first Daily 5 assignment will be given next week.

Listening to Reading/Daily 5 Update

Thank you to the students and parents who have brought to my attention how difficult (impossible) it is to download audible books from the Public Library onto Apple products.  It is disappointing considering how many current titles are available.

Listening to Reading is still a valuable skill, and whenever possible, students should listen to quality reading.  There is a listening station in the classroom, however, access is limited to 5 students per rotation.  With 2-3 rotations/class, it will be difficult for all students to take advantage of it every week.

With student feedback, I am looking at how to change Daily 5 to work better in the rotary format.  Due dates and formal assignments are coming.  You can look forward to more discussion about this in class.  Any feedback you have on how to improve Daily 5 in English would be appreciated.

Some comments that I have heard are:

• more formal assignments with due dates
• reduce the rotations to 2/class with more formal teaching time (20 min rotations, 10 mins teaching)
• non Daily 5 classes for catch up
• add another list of challenging words for Word Work

I am excited to learn more from you.  It is your learning, your time.  Let's us it the best way possible!

Listening to Reading

Listening to Reading, activity four of five for Daily 5 will be introduced this week.

If you haven't already done so, please download a book from the library onto your mp3 player that you bring to class.

Here are 3 stories that I have borrowed from the Public Library that you may borrow onto your devices.

To view/listen to Alexandria Of Africa, you will need Adobe Digital Editions (free)


To view/listen to Thunder Over Kandahar and/or The Outsiders you will need OverDrive (free)

I am working on getting CD copies of books for our listening centre from Terry James (the Board's teachers' library) over the next few days.

Word Work Options

There are 1200 words in the Word Work folders to choose from.  Some of you are very comfortable with the spelling of all these words.  Some of you need to keep working on these words.  This is the joy of Daily 5, working and learning where you are at, to become a better writer and reader.

Looking for new and interesting words?  Check out this Word of the Day website.  There is also past word of the day on the right, linking back to word lists to the mid 90s.

Want a challenge on definitions?  Check out Vocabulary.com to see what words you know, and new ones for next time.  This is a great activity to do during Daily 5 Word Work on your wireless handheld device.  Document your learning in your Daily 5 folder as Vocabulary.com and write down at least 5 words and their definitions.

The origins activity can be made easier with dictionary.com .  Look up your word, scroll to the bottom on the page and find the origins section.

Antonyms and synonyms are also available at dictionary.com

You are encouraged to play around with words, find the definitions, antonyms and synonyms.  The more words you know and feel comfortable using, the more likely you will use them in your writing, which adds detail and interest to your reader.  Also, the more you know about words, the easier it is for you to read when you come across new words.    

Daily 5 Success Criteria

Thank you to all the classes for your hard word on your anchor charts to remind you what you need to do during Daily 5 to ensure that everyone is learning.

I have taken your anchor charts and turned them into Success Criteria. This will be posted in each class for you to review as needed.  We will also take some time to self evaluate our Daily 5 Success Criteria later in the year, once all five activities are up and running.

Choice and Conferencing

This week in class, we will be working on successfully setting up our Daily 5 folders (where your passport for keeping track of your activities and Working with Words work is kept) and actually practising three rotations of Read to Self, Read to Someone and Word Work.  

Once we have successfully done three full rotations as a class, and a second class of three rotations where I put you in selected groups to go through the three rotations, you will be allowed choice, and hopefully, I will begin conferencing.

When I call you to conference, I will be asking about your strengths as a reader and what you want to work on this year.  This will help to direct our conference time better.  Please start thinking about who you are as a reader and what you need to work on to become an even better reader.

After a handful of successful classes of choice and conferencing, introduction of Listening to Reading and Work on Writing will take place, followed by Writers Workshop where you will begin your first writing piece.