This Past Week in Language Arts & Social Studies...

The students have been staying busy finishing up their compare and contrast objective and starting learning about literary elements. The students have started a historical fiction novel, Sounder, by William H. Armstrong. Sounder is a novel about a family who were sharecroppers in the late 1800's. The novel is a great way to understand the life of a sharecropper and then be able to compare and contrast sharecropping to slavery (what the students are learning about Social Studies). Additionally, we have learned and related the literary elements of: setting, characterization, and point of view to the first three chapters of Sounder this past week. Next week we will look at the literary elements of conflict, start the plot line of Sounder (exposition and rising actions), and continue studying characterization. The following week we will finish the novel and complete the plot line for Sounder.