Dear Parents,
Happy New Year! We hope you had a restful and festive holiday. Now that we are back in school, mainstream teachers will be switching from social studies to science this month. Thus, we will be helping our ESL students by working with the vocabulary of our “Living Systems” unit. This includes the digestive and respiratory systems in humans, along with the living systems of vascular plants.
Classroom teachers will also begin perhaps the most difficult part of the grade 5 curriculum. In Writers’ Workshop fifth graders will be writing a literary essay. The most important component of this writing piece is to make sure that fifth graders can justify their opinion with evidence from the story. This is a skill that they will be using for the duration of their academic careers. ESL students will be working on generating paragraphs with clear topic sentences that support their claim, and students will learn how to pull evidence from a text and embed it in their paragraphs using correct punctuation. They will develop paragraphs with sentence structures of varying length that show a growing understanding of how complex sentences can be formed and used appropriately. ESL students will spend time working on their summarizing skills to include important evidence from the text, including quotes. Many of these summaries will rely on using a variety of past tenses such as the simple past, past progressive and present and past perfect.
You can help your child prepare for this difficult task by asking them questions about their independent reading. Some questions you can ask to help foster this vital academic skill are the following:
Who is the main character in your story?
What is the main character like? What evidence can your child give you to support the answer?
What is the main character’s goal? How does your child know?
What is the conflict of the story?
Key Vocabulary: essay, literary, thesis, topic sentence, evidence, embed, summarize, theme, author’s style, setting, symbol, citation, counterargument
As always, if you have any questions about our program, please feel free to call or email us Once again, Happy New Year; may the Year of the Dragon be a prosperous one for you and your family.
Regards,
Mark S. Gurecki Virginia Blais Lynn Somers
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
January Letter
Dear Parents,
We hope you had a relaxing winter holiday and we wish you a Happy 2012-Year of the Dragon. As you probably know, due to the luck of the calendar this year, there are three weeks before our Chinese New Year holiday, when school dismisses Friday January 20. During this time, support classes will continue to focus on both the Immigration vocabulary in our Social Studies unit, and the Feature Article writing unit. We have been working on some essential components of writing a feature article which include developing the voice, using good leads, and the key skill for students: How to use other feature articles as mentor texts to improve their own piece. Both units will conclude before the Chinese New Year holiday.
We fully understand that Chinese New Year is the most important time of the year for many families. This is a great experience for your children, in itself for cherished cross-generational family memories, but also from a teacher’s viewpoint, because it can generate some memorable moments that will make outstanding Writers’ Workshop pieces later in the year. If possible however, due to the “Use it or lose it” law of learning a language, please try to have your child read at least 45 minutes in English each day of the holiday.
Your child’s classroom teacher will soon be sending you the specifics of our grade five Chinese New Year holiday celebration on the fourth floor. We hope to see you there.
Once again, we wish you a prosperous and healthy 2012—Year of the Dragon.
Regards,
Mark S. Gurecki Virginia Blais Lynn Somers
We hope you had a relaxing winter holiday and we wish you a Happy 2012-Year of the Dragon. As you probably know, due to the luck of the calendar this year, there are three weeks before our Chinese New Year holiday, when school dismisses Friday January 20. During this time, support classes will continue to focus on both the Immigration vocabulary in our Social Studies unit, and the Feature Article writing unit. We have been working on some essential components of writing a feature article which include developing the voice, using good leads, and the key skill for students: How to use other feature articles as mentor texts to improve their own piece. Both units will conclude before the Chinese New Year holiday.
We fully understand that Chinese New Year is the most important time of the year for many families. This is a great experience for your children, in itself for cherished cross-generational family memories, but also from a teacher’s viewpoint, because it can generate some memorable moments that will make outstanding Writers’ Workshop pieces later in the year. If possible however, due to the “Use it or lose it” law of learning a language, please try to have your child read at least 45 minutes in English each day of the holiday.
Your child’s classroom teacher will soon be sending you the specifics of our grade five Chinese New Year holiday celebration on the fourth floor. We hope to see you there.
Once again, we wish you a prosperous and healthy 2012—Year of the Dragon.
Regards,
Mark S. Gurecki Virginia Blais Lynn Somers
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