Parents, this weekend take a second to check in with you child about their research project.  At this point, most students should be very close to finished.  When you look at their research gathering sheets, you should see three different colors of paper stapled together. Each color represents all the gathered information for one topic, which will also be one body paragraph.

The rule of thumb is that each topic (paragraph) needs to be researched using three resources (one of which needs to be an actual book), and students need to gather seven facts per resource per topic.  In other words, a "fully" researched topic will have three sets of seven facts, or 21 facts.  Since each student is researching three topics (early life, importance, legacy, causes, etc.), a fully researched paper will have 63 facts.  Some of these facts will be repeated because multiple sources reported the same facts.

Early next week (Monday or Tuesday, depending on how today's research goes) we will move on from gathering information to the actual writing of the paper.

When you don't know what other facts you can gather, ask yourself if you have:

• What's interesting
  
• What's important
  
• Who is involved
  
• When it happened
  
• Where it happened
  
• Why it happened
  
• How it happened

For example, if you are writing a paragraph about the events leading up to the winter at Valley Forge or the Battle at Yorktown, you might ask yourself, "Why did General Washington choose Valley Forge?  Where there other options?  Was there something attractive about Valley Forge?"

For Yorktown, ask yourself why the army was moving to Yorktown.  Did they have to go there?  Were they choosing to go there?  What was different about Yorktown than all the other places in the colonies?

Don't forget you need to have your library books here in class tomorrow.  If none of your books are in yet, then you need a note from your parent saying that.

Check out this video from Common Craft on how to find what you want on the internet efficiently.

Here are some search tips:

• Search with keywords, not questions.
  
• Imagine what words will be on the site you would like to find.
  
• You probably want to ignore the advertised sites at the top.  They paid to be there.
• Words like of, the, a, and in are usually left out of your query.
  
• Use quotation marks to search for phrases.  For example, searching for sand sharks will look for those two words in any order in any places on a website, but "sand sharks" searches for that exact phrase in that exact order any place on a website.
  
• Sort your Google search results by reading level.
• Use a search engine that automatically gives you reliable results like Sweet Search.

Parents, we are starting a new unit next week in which we will be researching people, places, and events from the American Revolution.  Our research will take place in books and the internet.  

Today, those students who remembered their library cards, reserved library books that will hopefully be ready for you to pick up shortly.

Those students who forgot their library cards wrote down the names of books they would like to use and they will need to pull them themselves when they go to the library.

Either way, I'm hoping that each student has some relevant books here at school by next Wednesday.  The exception would be students whose reserved library books that are not available yet.

This year, the theme of the Anything Project is "Excellence and Experiments".  The idea is that for the next week and a half you can work to create anything you want... a story, a research project, a stop motion video, etc. The catch is that is has to be done excellently.  Pick something that God has gifted you in and do it as well as you can, free of specific expectations and restrictions by your teacher.  Have fun, work hard and be creative!

Or... you might rather try an experiment.  Maybe instead of doing something that you're really good at, you decide to try something new that you aren't so sure about.  You're experimenting and seeing what you might be capable of creating.  Maybe it won't be excellent because this is the first time you've tried it.  That's okay!  Let yourself be okay with taking a risk!


Some ideas we came up with in class are:

• political speeches
  
• video games
  
• book on balloon animals
  
• movie
  
• something with physics
  
• music
  
• song
  
• short story
  
• cookbook
  
• game book
  
• football play book
  
• PowerPoint presentations
  
• research
  
• magazine
  
• website
  
• poetry
  
• blog
  
• book of pranks

The only expectations are that you are working hard every day and that you are finished by the end of class next Wednesday.

As of today, I have received all of the student's business letters.  If you haven't seen the feedback I gave your child yet, ask to have a look.  Most of the letters could stand to be revised on one way or another.  And since it takes us so long to go through the writing process, these major writing assignments stand for much more of a student's grade than other assignments.

When we get back from break, I would love to see that a number of students have taken my feedback and used it to improve their writing.  In fact, what is the point of all this feedback if students don't use it to improve?

In Language Arts, students can always turn in a paper a second or third time to demonstrate growth in some area.   If your child isn't sure how to add sentence openers, transitions, or something else, you can always use the Language Arts helpers at the top of the Helpful Tools page.  And of course, students can always set up a time to meet with me after break and get one on one instruction if they need it.