Sixth Grade Communication Arts
by Jana Young
October 03, 2008
There will be NO SCHOOL on Friday, October 10. School is being dismissed for District Teachers' Meeting. Next Wednesday, October 8, is another early dismissal. Be marking October 23rd on your calendar. Parent-Teacher conferences will be held that day from 1:30-7:00 P.M. For those of you who have never experienced middle school conferences before, here is the setup. All middle school and high school teachers will be in the high school gym. Each teacher has a table. Conference times are not scheduled as they are in the elementary. Simply come at your convenience and visit with your child's teachers as they become available. Usually you can visit with all teachers in approximately 30 minutes, unless you have picked a busy time. It seems like we are especially busy from 1:30-3:00, then get busy again from 5:00-6:30.
Reading
We didn't get to our suspense plays this week. We took some extra time to prepare for the constructed response questions on the test for our last story. We also spent time looking over some of those answers after the tests were scored. I felt the extra time was beneficial because students were able to hear the difference between answers that were lacking in information and answers that were explained completely.
Next week we'll read the two suspense plays at the end of this unit. We'll also take a unit test on Thursday. This test covers the skills we've covered so far in reading. Students will have to apply what they've learned.
English
The next spelling test will be taken on Friday, October 17th. The words for that test all have suffixes:
1. toughness 7. adorable
2. sincerely 8. noticeable
3. slowly 9. stranger
4. happily 10. hopeless
5. friendliness 11. argument
6. reversible 12. assignment
We'll also take the word "receive" again. That word was misspelled many times on the first test!
Teachers who are part of the eMints training are being required to give a comprehensive exam to all students. This exam must have questions over all areas of curriculum to be covered throughout the year. Students will take the test twice: once now and again at the end of the year to show gains. We will be taking the English test on Tuesday, continuing into Wednesday if necessary. This test will NOT be part of the students' grade as we have not covered everything that will be on the test. This isn't anything the students need to study for ahead of time or worry about. Just tell them to do their best.
We'll also begin studying pronouns next week.
