December News

When the progress reports came home in the brown envelopes at the end of November, you should have received a letter explaining about online CRCT practice tests.  Homeroom teachers have received the test identification numbers.  If your child is in my homeroom and you are interested in using the online practice tests, just email me and ask for your child's number.

We have just finished the novel "The Watsons Go To Birmingham-1963".  The final test over the entire book will be given tomorrow (Tuesday 12/12).  This will be one of our rare scantron tests.  Notebooks will be checked a final time for this grading period on Friday, 12/15.  We continue to be disappointed in the lack of student use of the book logs.  This one assignment continues to ruin grade averages for those who continue to ignore the important impact this has on their grades.

Important vocabulary for this grading period is:

antagonist, protagonist, theme, topic, imagery, symbolism, personification, simile, metaphor, and conflict

We will be reviewing this vocabulary for the rest of the week and taking a post test on those terms on Friday.  Your student should be familiar with most of these terms already and should definitely be able to apply them to any story by Thursday.  The notebook check and post test will be the last grades probably taken for this report card. 

Next week we will work on summarizing skills.