For our first unit in reading this year, we will be reading books relating to Money and Sense.  We will be focusing our vocabulary on economic terms and start our unit off by reading the book Lawn Boy, by Gary Paulsen.  In groups, we will be reading books about kids making money.  We will discuss some of the problems the characters come across as they start making their money in the books Lunch Money and Lemonade War.  Students will also be reading the 4th grade Core Knowledge book, Treasure Island written by Robert Louis Stevenson.  As a class, we will be discussing greed and what it does to the characters in this adventurous story.

     As we start our unit in social studies on Colorado History, we will be reading the book Hard Gold by AVI as a class.  This book is about the Colorado Gold Rush to Pikes Peak and Cherry Creek.  It will be a fun read to go along with many of the topics we will be covering in social studies.

     CCA's writing curriculum focuses on the 6+1 Traits of Writing.  Those traits are: Ideas, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, Conventions, and Presentation.  Throughout the year we will be focusing on each of these traits as we work on different writing pieces.  Many of my writing assignments are based on trade books so that the kiddos have an author's expert writing abilities to base their writing off of.  
     We will be writing many creative stories this year as well as a couple different research papers.  In addition to assigned writing pieces, students will also be keeping a writing notebook.  In this writing notebook, students will keep their own ideas for what they want to write about and story starters that we work on together.  Students will have many chances during the week to work on their own writing projects.  I believe it is so important for students to not only be able to write about what I ask of them, but to come up with their own ideas as well.  Each month, students will be asked to turn in one assignment from their writing notebook that they feel they have done their very best on.