Today we played a sentence game. The object is to build a sentence from the ten cards you are given. This game helps to build grammar and sentence structure skills.

Today we read a Christmas story called, "The Clumsy Elf." We used context clues to determine the meaning of new words. We also worked on foreshadowing to determine what might happen next.

Today, we finished the story. Then we discussed the theme, finding evidence from the text to support our ideas. We also answered discussion questions that required critical thinking beyond the text.

Jackson read the book and answered topic questions. He did a good job identifying the themes and discussing the characters.

I presented Austin with theree literary articles from which to choose andhe selected a readWorks article about a paper airplane contest. Austin knew the vocabulary that was selected as more complex and most challenging, but Austin was able to effectively explain and define the words, using examples, which demonstrated his understanding. We discussed the function of idioms and how they are not to be taken literally. We also read a different genre today - a poem. Austin was challenged by one of the questions but ultimately arrived at the correct answer and stated his rationale that helped him decide on hsis choice. Austin was asked to compare a dream he's had with the poem we read and he demonstrated a good abilty to analyze the two and compare and contrast them logically. Austin requested that we read more in our novel by louis Sachar. We remember where we had left off and read from chapter 12 - chapter 18. Austin commented that he thinks the story is relly good and asked me to read more - even after it was time to leave. He analyzed the relationship of the protagonist and the antagonist in the story as new more complex relationship emerged in subsequent chapters. Austin made insightful comments and predictions as we read, and answered queries about the content and character analyses which demonstrated excellent synthesis and integration of the material.

We completed a "show not tell" exercise today, where David took sentences and transformed them with descriptive details and strong verbs.

We continued reading this short story today, stopping to make predictions about what might happen next.

We continued reading our story today. PJ predicted what might happen next, based on clues from the text. We also studied the protagonist and how his character is evolving at this point in the story.

Matthew used his critical thinking skills to create stories using cubes as a story generator to spark his imagination. He had fun rolling the 9 cubes and picked an image to use as the starting point, beginning with "once upon a time." Matthew was very creative and used his problem-solving skills to use all the cubes to link the 9 face-up images together resourcefully multiple times during the course of the session .

David's task was to choose character and plot story cards and create a snippet of a story using these cards.