Upcoming Events, Reminders, and Assignments

*Please remember to send your child's grade card envelope back to school Monday. Also, please send the Halloween party form back if you are able to bring anything for the party. You may arrive for the party at 1:15 if you are planning to come.

Monday, October 29th: We will be traveling to SKYPAC in Bowling Green to watch the play, "Rock the Presidents". We will be departing from HES around 8:15 A.M. and return around 1:00 P.M.

Tuesday, October 30th: We will be reviewing what we covered the end of last week.  We took a pre-test on Monday of last week over applying  knowledge of drama vocabulary to answer questions when reading a play.  We read several plays the end of last week and described characters, setting, and events (plot). We also acted a couple of them out in class. We will wrap that up and students will be bringing home the plays and questions that go along with them to study for the post-test which will be Friday, November 2nd. We also began a mini-lesson on pronouns last week.  Students will be bringing their journals home to study for the pronoun quiz on Wednesday, October 31st. Please make sure the journals are sent back to school because we use these in class almost every day. 

Wednesday, October 31st: HaPpY hALLoWeEn!!! *Students may dress up on Wednesday, but please do not allow them to wear masks or face paint.  Pronoun quiz will be at the beginning of class.  We will be doing Halloween grammar activities after the pronoun quiz. 

Thursday, November 1st: Students will be revising a paragraph that was written in their journals about the play we saw this past Monday.  They have a choice of whether to write about what their favorite part of "Rock the Presidents" was and why, or they can write about pretending to be the stage manager with endless money and space and how they would design the production of "Rock the Presidents" differently. Disscussions about and activities with a "super" paragraph will lead students into developing a well revised paragraph about their chosen topic. 

Friday, November 2nd: We will be using the mobile lab to take our post-test over drama.  Students took the pre-test using Study Island last Monday, and they will be taking the post-test on Study Island as well.  Study Island can be accessed from home using your child's login to see his or her score on the pre-test and the post-test.  There is a link to Study Island on the right side of this blog underneath the "about me" section. 

**Please notice there is also a link to Fun English Games and other website links to the right of this blog.  Students can play games to sharpen their skills on this website.  Also, there is a link to Accelerated Reader to the right as well.  Goals for AR and book-it will be sent home the end of this week.

                                       ~*Have a great week!!!*~

Acting

Students have really enjoyed learning about drama by acting out plays and creating a vocabulary flip book to learn the structural elements of drama. We are going to see a play on Monday, October 29th, so I hope my 4th graders will be familiar with the in's and out's of a play.  We have had a lot of fun learning about dramas. 

Officer Burton and Cain's visit for Red Ribbon Week

On Friday, October 26th, Officer Burton and K-9, Cain came to visit Highland Elementary for Red Ribbon Week.  Our students really enjoyed watching the intelligence of this 18 month old police dog. 

Drama and Prose

We wrapped up comparing drama (plays) and prose (stories) last week.  In class, we used a Venn diagram graphic organizer to create a visual when comparing structural elements of drama and prose.  I had the Venn diagram pocket chart hanging up for students to place sentence strips in the correct circle after writing the element on a sentence strip.  We did this as a class; each student had their own copy of a Venn diagram to fill out as the sentence strip was placed correctly. Students really enjoyed doing this activity.  Comparing drama and prose came full circle to them after being able to use a Venn diagram to organize their knowledge. 

October 22, 2012

This week in ELA we are using our knowledge of drama vocabulary to answer questions when reading plays.  We are also comparing the dramatic elements to poetic elements and prose.