It's time to begin the fifth unit of our Reading Street series. The five stories of Unit 5: Responsibility center around a common theme - "What does it mean to be responsible?" This week's selection is Angela Royston's narrative nonfiction Fire Fighter! in which children will read about a fire station and the people who work there. The setting of this week's paired selection is also a fire station. My students should enjoy reading and acting out the short play Fire Fighting Teamwork, by Connie Carpenter.

Your child can practice this week's vocabulary list words by playing the series of Java Games linked below in the Quia Activities section. There are four games that range in difficulty, beginning with Flashcards, then Match Game, Concentration, and finally Word Search. The words and definitions are available online by clicking the link to the List of Terms found near the top of any of the Java Games pages. Once your child has mastered matching the list words and definitions, he should click the link for the Cloze Activity which tests list vocabulary in sentence context.

The Useful Links section contains Internet links to enrichment activities, information, fun, and games that correlate to this week's stories. I have provided them for you to use with your child(ren) at home. We'll work with suffix endings -ly, -ful, -er, and or in Spelling this week, so you'll find links to spelling games that stress suffixes. This week's grammar skill is identifying pronouns, so I've included links for that skill near the bottom of the list.