Page 5 - SN November - Grade 5

EAL

MS. VISNJA PLECAS

Dear Parents,

In this period, in EAL classes, Grade 5 students reinforced the reading and writing skills they were
learning in their homerooms. We read a number of news articles about interesting events that hap-
pened in the world and discussed the broad issues that they dealt with. Students identified key words
and the main ideas in the texts as a whole, and then paragraph by paragraph, and learned new vocab-
ulary. The students were given an organizing framework to identify the lead (who, what, where, when
and how) and to take notes about the important points in the story. After reading the articles and dis-
cussing the events and people involved, the students practiced note-taking skills. The newspaper re-
port framework was then used as a basis for re-telling the news item in summary form. These writing
activities served to show what areas of writing the children were successful in crafting and which
ones were still areas in need of development. In this period, we also focused on re-introducing basic
grammar concepts and we revisited the different parts of speech. We will continue to talk about
nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns etc. as this knowledge is important for the students to
continue building their understanding of grammar and how language functions.