Global Horizons: Fifth Grade- Foxworth & Bosch

It’s that time of the year when every family (including mine) has a variety of errands and events scheduled everyday.  There just isn’t enough time in the day to get it all done!  Unfortunately, my blogging time has been greatly reduced.  Today I’m going to do a recap of the week so far.  We are continuing to enjoy our holiday literature.  Monday we finished up An Ellis Island Christmas, which provided great connections to our study of immigration in social studies.  As we read that book, we talked about monitoring our thinking as we read.  We tracked the times we found ourselved distracted from the reading, and we learned that we experience both good and bad distractions.  The bad ones come from other people around us.  The good ones come as we think about our reading, and we make connections or ask ourselves questions.  These inner distractions actually help us clarify our comprehension.

Yesterday we read Welcome Comfort by Patricia Polacco.  In this story we discovered these themes:  it’s important to show kindness to others, everyone deserves to be treated with respect, and sometimes it’s worthwhile to believe in things you can’t see.   Today we read another book by Polacco, The Trees of the Dancing Goats, and we identified themes of friendship, appreciating differences in the beliefs and traditions of others, and showing kindness to people in need.    Students wrote about these themes in their reading response notebooks.