December 1-9, 2016

Image source: Pixabay.com

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Talking About the Past

Unit Objectives:

Students will

• understand the use of past tense verbs
• accurately use past tense verbs to describe actions performed at a specific point in time in the past.
• identify the difference between past simple and past progressive tenses in authentic texts. 
• familiarize themselves and increase knowledge of irregular verbs
• accurately pronounce past tense verbs ending in "ed"

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Appetizer (Pre-Assessments):
Students will complete the following pre-assessments:

• Read and record the paragraph found in the "Past Tense" folder in BB Learn.
• See Mrs. Gonzalez if you cannot find the paragraph.
• Login to noredink.com and take the following diagnostic assessments
• Simple Tenses
• Perfect and Progressive Tenses

Entree (Reading):
Log in to newsela.com and choose one of the following articles for the reading assignment.

• "Proof that the world will end tomorrow!"
• "Baseball's Fernandez, who died in an accident, fought hard for his freedom"
• "Cubans have a long list of things they can and can't sell to the U.S."
• "Chocolate's history is a sweet Mesoamerican story"
• "Strong opinions on English-only laws"
• After selecting the article to read, students will complete the following during the reading
• Annotate as follows
• Highlight in PINK any new/unknown words  
• Highlight regular past tense verbs in GREEN
• Highlight irregular past tense verbs in BLUE
• Highlight the following in YELLOW:
• Answers to quiz questions
• Anything found to be surprising or interesting
• Anything that's not understood or would like to learn more about.

Three Side Dishes (Grammar, Pronunciation, Writing):

• Based on the results of the diagnostic assessment, all students will complete the following assignments on noredink.com.
• Present Tense Verbs
• Past Tense Verbs
• Based on the results of the pronunciation pre-assessment, students will complete the lesson on "Pronouncing 'ed' Endings
• Students will complete a blog post based on the Newsela reading selection in the Entree section
• Use your annotations to compose the blog post.

Dessert (Speaking):

Students will answers questions on Recap.com based on the article read.