End of February/Beginning of March

The Red Fox Clan began Renaissance Project. Here is the brief outline of the project:

1. Make sure your outlines of the two chapters on the Renaissance are complete

2. Choose two famous people to research

3. Find at least two resources using your local library and or the internet

4. Photocopy and then write the topics in the margins, highlight, and outline (if photocopying isn’t available or you aspire to make a high quality outline straight from reading the book, go for it!)

5. Organize your outlines and determine how many paragraphs you will write and what they will consist of

6. Draft the body of your report

7. Get lessons on writing an introduction and a conclusion, and then write!

8. Self revise ideas, organization, voice, sentence fluency and word choice

9. Peer revise the above mentioned traits

10. Self edit conventions

11. Peer edit conventions

12. Final Draft

Students have been working this past week on outlines, which are due tomorrow, March 9. First drafts are due Monday, March 14. Peer revising and editing will take place in school on Thursday, March 17th and final drafts will be due March 22nd. Red Fox Clanners have chosen some fascinating folks to research. I'm quite excited to see them put their research, outlining and writing process skills to use!

Students completed final drafts of their Weather/Wildlife Reports. Using nces.ed.gov, students created line graphs, bar graphs and pie charts. Using OpenOffice students created tables of their data. Stop by the room and look for our reports hanging on the bright red paper!

We have also begun our investigation of weather at one of the most exciting weather times of the year! We began by watching a discovery video on weather and have had lessons focusing on air and the atmosphere. Students have recorded what they've learned in their Flight Logs, complete with pictures and diagrams.

And... more writing. The Red Fox Clan completed the writing process with their five paragraph essays. As mentioned in the last post, students self and peer edited/revised. They also completed a revision/editing checklist and rated their piece using a rubric. The topics which they assessed were Ideas, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency and Conventions.