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Reading
Nature's Fury - In our theme entitled Nature's Fury, we will read about tornadoes, volcanoes, tsunamis, blizzards, earthquakes, and other acts of nature. We'll use various reading strategies such as predicting, classifying, comparing & contrasting, and analyzing text structure. We'll discuss the authors of these fiction and nonfiction works, including their integration of art and science.
Voices of the Revolution - This theme expands upon our studies of the American Revolution. We will use an evaluative strategy to analyze the author's writing style while expanding our background knowledge. We'll read historical fiction, nonfiction, and even explore the origins of the song "Yankee Doodle". 
Animal Encounters - Grizzly bears, golden lion tamarins, and other encounters of nature are all topics we'll read about in this Houghton Mifflin Unit. Reading a combination of fiction and nonfiction stories, we'll focus on making generalizations, fact and opinion, main ideas, and drawing conclusions |
Writing
Informational - Our first writing assignment this year will be an informational piece written about a topic of the student's choice. We'll be using a five paragraph essay format and work on developing our focus and organization of a nonfiction piece.
Persuasive - We will build off of the skills we learned writing our informational piece to write a persuading paper. Analyzing the various tools we use to persuade, we'll choose the most effective ones to try to change our reader's viewpoint. Continuing to develop our focus and organization, we'll also take a look at our voice and how we can use it to persuade.
Narrative - We'll write several narrative pieces this year including a personal narrative, fable, and narrative of choice. Our focus will be on style and plot development as we learn how to gain our readers interest through fresh images, character depth and development, and original plot lines.
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