Sunday, March 23rd, 2024

Dear Michael's parents,

Michael continues to impress and develop. As a testament to his terrific attitude, he was very engaged, focused and diligent despite it being a Sunday morning. As usual, Michael worked hard and intensely through the class and did so with a high degree of accuracy. 

Encouragingly he is picking up some common native idioms and collocations such as "light-hearted" versus "heavy-hearted" and "Killing Two Birds with One Stone" (where Jed, the main character solved two problems with one solution, the building of the footbridge).

We also dived into The Long Walk's deeper multi-layered symbolism: where the title represents both the literal "long walk" to school and the "long journey" involved in building a new footbridge over many years involving many obstacles and challenges.

WHAT WE COVERED IN TODAY'S CLASS

In today's lesson, we initially reviewed his homework diving into the grammatical and phonic differences between suffixes, prefixes, digraphs and blends as that required some clarification. Following that, we covered the following literacy concepts and strategies from Lesson 29 - U2L10 - The Long Walk (On-Level Reading):

(1) Key conceptual foundation themes: identification, clues pre-reading and post-reading
(2) Key / New vocabulary: translations, definitions, context, synonyms and antonyms
(3) Reading strategies: decoding, context clues, text features, and comprehension
(4) Genre study: Realistic Fiction 
(5) Understanding Key Themes: What are the themes?; What obstacles does the main character overcome? (resilience, problem-solving, courage, a community working-together).
(6) Summarising the Main Idea: What is the passage about?
(7) Connections and comparisons: text-to-self and text-to-world connections
(8) Prediction while reading: inferring what may happen next
(9) Symbolism of the main idea: "The Long Walk" with its multi-layered symbolism

HOMEWORK

For homework if Michael has time, could he please complete the following:

(1) Lesson 10 Homework: U1L7 - Phonics & Spelling Practice

(2) Lesson 30: U2W5 Weekly Test

(3) Before our next class, pre-read the reading passage in Grade 4, Lesson 1: U1L1 - Think It Through (Read and Write), which will be for our next class.

Have a wonderful week ahead and I look forward to seeing Michael again. Warm wishes, and all the best for Michael and the entire family.

Kind regards,
Teacher Philip