Quarter 2

Essential Question: What role does perspective play in decision making? 

Our theme for the second quarter is “Survival”. We will analyze how animals are portrayed across nonfiction and fiction texts. We will read stories of how people and animals survive in harsh and changing conditions and discover how they adapt to these challenges. Our novel will be The One and Only Ivan.  

In writing, we will extend our narrative work by continuing a given story while keeping the integrity of that story. We will use our novel and other main characters we’ve read about to write literary analysis essays. Students will write an essay about a character from Fox. 

We will be focusing on the following skills for ELA this quarter: 

Literature: making inferences while quoting details from the text, using context clues to determine the meaning of unknown words and phrases, analyzing the structures of literary texts and being able to describe the differences between prose, poetry, and drama, and lastly, analyzing the connections between pictures and text to explain how they deepen our understanding of the text. 

Information: making inferences while quoting details from the text, determining the main idea and details while writing a summary, choosing the best summary from a group of summaries, analyzing the structures of nonfiction texts and being able to describe the purpose of each structure, and lastly, interpreting pictures, graphs, timelines, etc. to deepen understanding of a text. 

In word study, we will review the word inquiry process and study Greek and Latin roots.