Religion: Jonathan recited the Hail Mary and Our Father prayers. Language Arts: Today our daily language review focused on editing a friendly letter. Jonathan did well with the greeting and the closing. The letter was riddled with tricky spelling errors! We then moved on to writing. Jonathan finished working on his piece about a pet that can talk. He wrote about a dog named Rocky. His primary goals for this assignment were to have a strong beginning, middle, and end and to keep his writing focused on the prompt. He did a terrific job and accomplished both tasks. Our next step would be to look at proper writing of dialogue. We did look at some examples from our recent novel and talked about how there is a new line when each person speaks. We also discussed how we need to identify who is speaking by using things like “he said”, etc. These are higher level tasks that Jonathan has not yet learned, but would have been fun (and appropriate) to begin the process. Today we focused on enrichment activities related to topics of the past several books we’ve read. We enjoyed the article, A New Tail (3rd grade level), on www.readworks.org. This article shared the story of Winter the dolphin who has a prosthetic tail. We discussed the terms prosthetic, fluke, and crab trap in our reading. We then watched Winter in action trying out a new tail in a short You Tube video. Next, we read an article about Saving the Dolphins from Scholastic Learn at Home (grade 3 – 5). We read of two dolphins that had been taken from the ocean and then abandoned in a tank when a sale to a hotel did not go through. The story also told of overfishing, and how dolphins have been killed or injured with tuna fishing nets. These events have been documented over video, which has helped to decrease these things from happening. To follow up from our Lions at Lunchtime novel, we read a fun narrative fiction story entitled, A Lion in the Bedroom on www.readworks.org. We also had fun thinking of riddles to describe zebras, giraffes, and elephants. Finally, in follow-up of our Polar Bears Past Bedtime novel, we watched a National Geographic video called Polar Bears 101. We learned many facts about the polar bears. We also read a nonfiction article (with pictures) about the Inuit People. We discussed that they are nomads and what that means. Finally, Jonathan took his spelling test related to this novel. He showed great improvement over these four days as his pretest score was 2/12 and today, he scored 9/12 + the two bonus words! This list had some tricky vowel pairs.