What is going on in ELA?

We have been hard at work with our second English Language Arts Unit: A Season of Chapters.  Our guiding question is how do the parts contribute to the whole?  In writing we started small and learned what makes a complete sentence.  From there we learned what are the three parts of a paragraph; topic sentence, the body, and the closing sentence.  Right now we are focusing on each of those parts and becoming experts in paragraph writing.  In reading we learned to look at a story and answer the 5Ws and How.  We learned that these questions help us to figure out 4 very important story elements; the setting, characters, problem, and the solution.  We also learned that fiction stories are written in a very organized way; the beginning, action in the middle, and the ending.  We also looked at nonfiction writing and text features that author's use to organize their writing.  Next week we are going to start looking more closely at poetry and some literary devices like rhythm, rhyme, simile, and metaphor.