Students, we are making real progress with our ‘Breathing Life into Essays’ unit of study. You are starting to realize that you don’t have to have “the perfect essay” done at this stage (or ever) and that the goal is to learn how to craft an essay using a variety of different strategies including the ones we looked at in class today. I am proud of you.

For homework tonight, take your latest thesis statement and try 2 or 3 of the following techniques in your writer’s notebook.

Practice using different sets of evidence to support one thesis statement. Read each thesis statement below and try supporting it using: kinds, parts, reasons, ways and finally, times when. Try to come up with three statements that support the claim for each of those types of support. If another way of supporting the thesis makes sense to you, of course try that way too!

Here’s an example of a thesis followed by ways to set up evidence that could support it:

Essay Possibility #1 (Kinds)
Fifth graders work hard; we study, we babysit our siblings, we help our parents.

Essay Possibility #2 (Parts)
Fifth graders work with three parts of themselves. They work with their bodies, they work with their emotions, and they work with their intelligence.

Essay Possibility #3 (Reasons)
Fifth graders work hard because we want to do well at school, because we want to please our parents, because we want to develop skills.

Essay Possibility #4 (Places/Ways)
Fifth graders work hard. We work hard in school, at home, and during sports.

Essay Possibility #5 (Times)
There are three times when fifth graders’ lives are filled with work. Fifth graders work before school, they work during school, and they work after school.

Remember the “Pie is good” example we did in class, don’t be worried if you can’t fit one of the above sets of evidence with YOUR thesis statement…just try the next one!

Guess who is a little bit famous today 5KP???

Me, Me, Me…

So check out the Shanghai Daily Sunday Edition and see if you recognize anyone in there. The online version tells the story but doesn’t include the wonderful pictures of the family posing around the cat! The funniest part of the story is not printed, it was when Elise from the Shanghai Daily first contacted me about doing a story on adoption. Talk about a ‘lost in translation’ moment, we spent the first 5 minutes on the phone with me talking about adopting Mimi without realizing that the paper actually wanted to talk to me about adopting the cat!

Click on the link below to read the whole article and students, if you are able to find the article online WITH photos, please, please tell me how you clever young people.

Former stray finds a loving home by — DAIDAI, a six-month-old tabby cat with beautiful colors and markings, has large ears and a small head. Just like other kittens, Daidai is active, energetic and curious about everything. He likes to play and is also…

I was so impressed with the class today as most of them remembered to bring their party food in as well as supplies and dvd’s and a great time was had by all this afternoon in 5KP. We were celebrating their first published 5th grade narrative which will be on display later in the week. Well done 5KP.

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649

Hi Parents and Students
I just copied the following from the Elementary Principal’s blog.

Dear Parents,

Students in grades 3 – 8 will Iowa Test of Basic Skills during the week of October 26th.

Shanghai American School provides many different sources of assessment throughout the year. One source of information is our program of standardized achievement testing. The test series we use, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, is a norm-referenced test. This means that a student’s scores indicate how he/she compares with a representative sample of peers (the norm group). This gives us an idea of how our students’ academic achievement compares to students at public and private schools from the United States and other international schools.

The following is a list of subject areas students are evaluated in:

* Vocabulary
* Reading Comprehension
* Language: Spelling, Capitalization, Punctuation, Usage and Expression
* Mathematics: Math Concepts and Estimation, Math Problem Solving and Data Interpretation, Math Computation

Reading comprehension includes: understanding factual information; drawing conclusions; inferring feelings of characters; and determining topic, viewpoint, attitude, structure, and style.
Math Concepts and Estimation includes: numeration and operations; measurement; fractions, decimals, and percents; and equations and inequalities.
Math Problem Solving and Data Interpretation includes: single step addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems; multiple step problem solving strategies; reading amounts; comparing quantities; and interpreting relationships.

Important Suggestions and Reminders:

* Students should get a good night’s sleep and eat breakfast before coming to school.
* It is important to remember that any individual’s test score is only a measure of how well he/she performed on a single assessment on a given day. The score may be different another day due to testing conditions and the physical and/or emotional state of the individual student.
* The IOWA is only one source of data the School uses to measure student achievement.

If you have any further questions, please contact your classroom teacher or the elementary administration.