Reminder  *No school on Friday - Staff Development Day.

Language Arts:  Hope everyone has helped their child in deciding who they are going to do their Black History Month report on.  We will discuss this morning.
Homework:  Your child should be working on their Biography each night for at least 30 minutes.  Please follow the rubric and checklist.  The completed report is due next Monday, February 1, 2010.  I  would encourage a paragraph a night to be written.  The Biography should be in your child's words.  If your child wants to bring in some of their work this week to show me, that would be great.

Last week we got through a lot of our Extended Response work - I did not expect to get through so much.  So, this week we  (and next) will focus again on Expository Writing.  This week our only focus will be the first paragraph of our writing-the introduction.  The intro will consist of three parts.  The first is the "grabber" or the sentence that gets the reader's attention.  This can be a question, an exclamation, an onemonopea -some kind of interesting sentence.  The next sentence should answer the question being asked.  The last sentence or two should be the "preview" for the paper-at least two details that the writer is going to tell us about.  We are going to spend all week - during writing - on developing our introduction of our paper.