How do I respond? 9-22-11

Today our focus was how to construct a response, given a prompt following reading.  Students are learning and practicing how to write a paragraph using well-developed sentences, order and examples and details.  Also, we have finished up our study of literal and figurative language, identifying connotation and denotation of words to help with context clues and are now ready to look at words in a whole new way.  We have begun to embark on our first vocabulary unit and having these tools in our belt will allow us to figure out words both in the vocab book but also in text that we are unsure of vs. skimmiing right by!