Mrs. Reid's Fifth Grade
ELA

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The first few weeks of school we have been working on building our Interactive Student Notebooks. Our focus has been on learing a story vocabulary and narrative structure that includes:

Setting

Protagonist

Antagonist

Plot

Complications

Resolution


We are going in depth on identifying possible themes within stories. Theme is often inferred or implied in texts and each reader may interpret the text in different ways. It's possible to have several themes for a story. What is important to be able to do as a reader is not only identify a theme, but be able to support your thinking by identifying supporting details from the text.


What is a theme? It is a truth or central idea a story reveals about life. 

How do we determine a theme? To help discover a theme, ask questions like: How did the main character change in the story? What, if anything, did the character learn? What could a reader learn from the story?


Theme should be expressed in the form of a statement, not just a single word. 


Theme should be stated as a generalization about life and does not refer to specific characters in the story. 


Theme should not be an over-generalization (avoid always, never, etc)


Theme is the central and unifying concept of a story.


There is no ONE way of stating the theme of a story.


Avoid stating theme in too familiar phrases such as "You can't judge a book by its cover" but instead look for a fresh perspective. 



Our first in class writing assignment is to craft a response to reading that includes an introduction, thesis, summary, identificiation of theme, and personal connection.

We will use a graphic organizer to identify our ideas and the writing process to develop our writing (brainstorm, draft, revise, edit, and publish using electronic resources.
We have been working on using punctuation marks in dialogue. Using Kid Snippets as an inspiration, students have written short scenes with a writing partner in class. They are creating a dialogue between an adult and child on the topic of BEDTIME. We will continue this work next week, adding in some narration and using a variety of structures for tagging the dialgue with a speaker.

We are adding common rules pages to our Interactive Student Notebooks and creating a resource for parts of speech.