Walking in the Steps of the Miwok Indians

Ongoing Homework: Students should remember to read for thirty minutes each evening. Remember there are no restrictions on what you choose to read, but please remember to record the date, the title of what you read, and how many pages you read on your Reading Journal entry form. Please turn in your entry forms on Friday, so that I can review how your reading is going. I will return them to you on Monday. I would encourage you to keep up with your reading over the weekend.

The students all did a great job presenting their work during Student, Parent, and Teacher conferences.

Yesterday the students explored the Miwok village at Point Reyes station. They were charged with the task of looking at the village with archeologists’ eyes. What information, clues, or suppositions could they take away from their excursion? Today in cultural studies the students set about testing their suppositions through research. They used books in the classroom, and notes taken by their classmates to develop a stronger sense of the Indians of California. As they answered questions they were, as always, encouraged to find more questions.

In language arts we are about to introduce the 6^th graders to the form of spelling they will be doing this year. As a precursor to their spelling assignments, I presented a unit today appropriately called, “A Brief History of the English Language.” We took a quick look at the various other languages that have mixed and influenced English, such as Latin, French and the Germanic languages. We then discussed how this complicated past and lack of unifying structure would make finding spelling rules difficult. The next step in this unit will be for the students to be shown how to develop their own personal spelling list that will be used to collect the words for their weekly spelling test.