Welcome to

Mrs. Chiodini's Web Site

english

Welcome to St. Joseph's English program for grades 4-5. English is full of new adventures in reading and writing. This program is packed with creative work! Journal writing takes a prominent place and the children are loving it. Between school and home each child spends about 15 minutes jotting down an observation, a memory we have of someone close to us, a funny event, a poem, a plan we are working out, a favorite recipe, a scary story, etc. The list goes on! It is palpably clear that expressing oneself on paper evokes words and sentences that become tools for crafting interesting and challenging entries. This looser writing is coupled with a tightly knit writing program "Write Shop," which progressively demands more and more highly structured paragraphs filled with dynamic language and keen insights.

Our Reading program follows the Lucy Calkins Reader Workshop progression. Lucy is a famous educator who created a stimulating reading program for the public school system in New York. She is the Founding Director of the Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College, in Columbia University, New York City, NY. Her work has spread throughout the country; thousands of schools are using her program to inspire a new generation of readers and consequently thinkers. One of my biggest objectives this year is to fill my class library with good books! Be sure and tell me about good titles or if you are feeling generous, ask me for a list!

Our spelling program is called "Spelling Wisdom." For anyone in the field of home schooling education, Charlotte Mason stands out as a leader in providing a beautifully scaffolded spelling program replete with wise sayings from classical literature as well as the Bible. While absorbing these important moral lessons, the children highlight words they don't know how to spell and study those words carefully. They also transcribe the sentence/phrase thereby practicing good penmanship, punctuation and spelling. After two days, I will dictate the sentence or phrase and they should be able to write it correctly both in terms of spelling, capitalization and punctuation. If you want to learn more about the Charlotte Mason method, watch this utube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGqakdjcS_U.