Our Grade 5 and 6 students have been tasked with a fun writing project this week: "YOU are the #1 Real Estate agent in the city. You've been able to sell every house at any price. Now... you've been asked to sell your first haunted house! Create a booklet to describe every detail of the house to potential buyers. You must tell the truth about the house, but you should try to put a positive spin on it. After all, 'fixer-upper' houses are a hot commodity these days! Can you sell it?" Our main focus for this writing project is to use adjectives and descriptions to enrich our word choice and sentence complexity. Students are doing SO WELL on this! We are also aiming to extend the quantity of our writing - expectations at this stage are to write "increasingly longer and more complex texts" of "several joined paragraphs." We wrote one paragraph a day this week - wow! Your children are showing such dedication, perseverance and hard work in their writing tasks. I'm SO proud of them all! A few examples of the transformations in their writing that I'm seeing daily: "I see a cat" becomes "I see a dark, purring cat that waits for me on the windowsill." "There is a ghost" becomes "There is a shadowy, screeching ghost that circles above my head." "I open the door" becomes "As I turn the rusty doorknob, I step inside the house with spin-chilling fear." Adjectives and descriptions are REALLY helping our writing! I'm blown away by how much their writing has improved with just this one activity. Below is the rubric that I will use to assess students. I find it helpful to show the class the expectations BEFORE they begin to write, so they know exactly how they will be marked. I have a class of ADJECTIVE masters! Take a look at this: On Friday, students also enjoyed making a creative Haunted House title page. Apparently junior students are not too old for crafts :-)
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Mrs JorgensenThis page is written by Mrs. Jorgensen, who loves the smell of a brand new book! Archives
March 2021
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