5th and 6th Grade MUR:
This week we finished up our unit on "Cats". Students had a great time watching Andrew Lloyd Webber bring these poems to life. We talked a lot about how human-like the "cats" are and the unique way in which Eliot was able convey this in his poetry. Our focus this unit was essay writing as we begin to prepare for our first interim assessment. We continue to focus on topic sentences for the rest of the year and then move to the body and conclusion in January.
In spelling our focus was "Before and After." Students learned the Latin phrase Praemonitus, praemunitus. "Forewarned is forearmed." Our theme emphasized the prefixes - pre and ante.
3rd and 4th Grade MUR:
What an exciting week we have had in MUR. We are finishing up chapter 6 in A Murder for her Majesty. The students are gathering facts and in hot pursuit of the murder. We have lots of "oh's" and "oh no!" during our reading. It's a joy to see the kids so involved in a book and learning so much at the same time. We have made such progress in our thinking and questioning skills from the beginning of the year. It is amazing to see how fast the students are able to learn. They are easily able to identify flashbacks and foreshadowing!
In grammar we are taking some time to study abstract nouns. This concept stumped many of the kids on our last grammar quiz. We will take the next week or so to work through abstract nouns and then possessive pronouns before we cycle back to our Analytical Grammar.
