Our first field trip is right around the corner! We are headed to the Tsongas Industrial History Center in Lowell for an exciting engineering program. I sent home a reminder in the students' Friday Folders. Students need to bring their lunch in a paper bag (unless they indicated they want school lunch) and should bring a jacket in case it rains. The forecast is looking better, so hopefully we'll avoid showers, but regardless most of the time will be spent indoors! Next week is also Diversity Week at the Kennedy. To kick off the week, we had an assembly where a bunch of students shared a little about their heritage. Our very own Bianca was one of those students, check out the photo below.

We started writing responses in our fiction unit. We're writing about characters and what traits we'd use to describe them. These responses include a central idea (a complete sentence with the title of the story, character's name, and traits), specific evidence from the text (what the character did, said, or thought that revealed the trait), and an explanation of how that evidence shows that trait. Our biggest hurdles have been differentiating between character traits and a character's feelings, expanding our character trait vocabulary, and explaining our evidence in our responses. We'll continue working on these areas over the next few weeks.

Our Bucket Fillers of the week were Ariana D. and Pedro. Ariana has really stepped it up in terms of homework and she's been trying hard in our character unit. Pedro is a great writer and reader, and has been having a successful year so far in ELA.