Month #4

I really can't believe it's already December! It doesn't always feel like it day-to-day, but this school year is flying by. This week's activities, in a nutshell:

Kindergarten kicked off a gingerbread unit that will take them through the rest of the month. We started today with the Gingerbread Man (so many versions out there, but I chose this one by Eric Kimmel). Students first brainstormed what they knew about this story and then we added to our list after we finished the story. 

Genres and nonfiction text features and websites, oh my!

We are about 1/3 of the way through the school year and I do feel like I am getting into a groove. I know (most) kids' names and have made some connections with what they are interested in and what they like to read. This was a busy week really diving into to some of the core material I want each grade to be competent in by the end of the year.

Kindergartners heard After the Fall, which is a new book that explores what happened to Humpty Dumpty after he fell off the wall. It's a beautifully illustrated book by a Caldecott honoree and tells a great story about not letting adversity get you down.

My Student Learning Goal this year is for 1st grade and it centers on knowing the difference between fiction and nonfiction. While we have covered some of the basics, I want to spend a few weeks diving deeper into nonfiction text features and how they can help you understand nonfiction. Eventually, there are 6 text features I want them to feel comfortable with, but we started off with 3 today: bold print, headings and captions. Using the document camera and some handouts I made, we walked through what each of these features means, and then they did a matching activity at the tables. Nearly every student completed the activity successfully - I am very hopeful that this will be rote by the end of the year.

2nd grade continued our study into genres. I chose to take a segment of folktales, and focused on the fairly tale subset. We brainstormed some of the common characteristics of fairy tales and used 3 Little Pigs as a mentor text to see if we could see some of these elements reflected in the story. We then read a fractured fairy tale - The True Story of the Three Little Pigs! - by Jon Scieszka, and compared what we heard with the traditional story. I truly love the fractured fairy tale sub-genre - I'd like to think of more ways to explore this next year.

3rd grade also took a detour into folktales, but I plan to take a few weeks to review all the different types of folktales. I'll be honest - this isn't my favorite genre, so I am going to need to get creative so they don't pick up on my feelings! This week we tackled fables - we filled out a graphic organizer as a class about The City Mouse and Country Mouse, and then in small groups, students analyzed a fable in the same way. They did a great job picking apart the nuances of this sub-genre.

4th grade kicked off a multi-week unit on Author's Purpose. We did an overview of the 3 main purposes - Persuade, Inform and Entertain (or PIE, for short), and read one of my recent favorite picture books, The Day the Crayons Quit, to analyze what makes an argument persuasive. As if the PIE acronym wasn't enough, students used OREO (Opinion, Reason, Example, Opinion restated), to break down each crayon's letter and decide if they were persuasive or not.

Last, but never least, 5th grade had one last library lesson on research before setting them loose to freely research their Passion Projects. I don't feel extremely confident that they have had a lot of experience evaluating websites, so that is what we did today. I adapted this lesson from Common Sense Media with pretty good success. I don't harbor any illusions that they are going to fully go through the checklist for every website they visit, but if they at least check a few of the criteria, I'll feel ok!

Gobble, Gobble

Another Thanksgiving-themed week in the library...

Thank You, Sarah, is a nonfiction book by Laurie Halse Anderson that tells the story of Sarah Hale, the woman credited with getting Thanksgiving to be recognized as a national holiday. I am always drawn to nonfiction books that a) tell a good story and b) highlight something I previously knew nothing about and this book delivers on both counts. In fact, I got quite a bit of mileage out of this book this week, using it in some capacity for 2nd, 4th and 5th grades!

Kindergarten and 1st grade once again shared the same read aloud, A Turkey for Thanksgiving by Eve Bunting (glad I have this blog to refer to, so I don't repeat next year!), but with different post-story activities. If you haven't read this one, it has a surprise ending, so it's a great story to use for practicing prediction. We began the read aloud and then I stopped the story about 2/3 of the way through (before the surprise is revealed). 1st graders divided into groups and drew on chart paper what they predicted was going to happen next. We shared our predictions and then finished the story. Kindergarten students had a more straightforward activity sheet, where they drew a picture of something surprising that might happen at their house.

This group's drawing included so many details from the text - yay for paying attention!

Global Read Aloud Collaboration

I've alluded to the 4th Global Read Aloud postcard project over the past couple of weeks so now that we finished our postcards, I thought it deserved its own post.

The Global Read Aloud is a program our 4th grades participated in this fall where they read a book as a class and shared their experience with the book with other classrooms across the world. Using Padlet, they were able to connect with each other and share thoughts about the book. 

Separately, I had attended a webinar on Britannica School and as part of the webinar, we were asked to create a lesson using Britannica. One feature I really liked in Britannica was the World Atlas, so the 4th grade teachers helped me make a connection with the GRA and the postcard idea was born. 

Each class created a postcard to share with their GRA schools, using photos from interesting places in Boston. It was a great learning experience for both them and me! Although it ended up taking me a little longer than I thought it would, the postcards did finally come together. 

Without further adieu...

Postcard #1

Postcard #2

November is for...

Veterans and Turkeys!

Looking ahead to the rest of the month, both November holidays gave me inspiration for my lessons this week.

As I was putting up my Thanksgiving book display (who knew we had so many picture books about Thanksgiving?!?), I came across some new-to-me books as well as some old favorites to share with students this week.

Kindergarten and 1st grade both heard Arthur's Thanksgiving, a classic by Marc Brown. With kindergartners, we continued using the 5 W's to better understand the elements of the story. 1st graders practiced sequencing by drawing a picture of something that happened at the beginning, middle and end of the story.

2nd grade dove into their first genre: Mystery. I recycled the genre dudes from last week and we brainstormed the elements of the mystery genre to watch out for in our read aloud this week. I found an unknown-to-me Jane Yolen book, Piggins, which was a great story to illustrate the elements of the genre, including identifying witnesses, suspects and detectives and noting which clues were important to figuring out the mystery.

3rd grade diverged from genres to do an activity around a favorite Veterans Day book of mine, Nubs: The True Story of a Mutt, a Marine and a Miracle. We heard the story, and then used the iPads and Brittanica school to learn some facts about Iraq and Jordan, 2 of the countries Nubs visited on his journey to America.

4th grade continued to make progress on their postcards for their Global Read Aloud schools.

I loved one of the new-to-me books so much, that I added an additional week of thick/thin questions to my 5th grade lessons this week so that I could take advantage of reading this book. Balloons Over Broadway tells the story of Tony Sarg, the puppeteer behind the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. We continued with thick/thin questioning about the book and segued to thinking up thick questions to guide our research.

Two Weeks for the Price of One...

Life is busy! I just sat down to blog about the PD I attended today and realized I am 2 weeks behind with my weekly updates. So, first things first!

Week of October 25

For the most part, we stuck with the silly/scary theme of last week.

I took a page from last week's 1st grade success stories, and did a repeat for my Kindergartners - The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything. This one is definitely a classic for a reason - so much fun and one to keep in my repertoire for next year.

1st grade heard The Perfect Pumpkin Pie by Denys Cazet. I brought in a little STEAM by creating a class graph of their favorite kinds of pie. The finished product came out pretty cute, and the kids were pretty engaged with helping plot out their index cards.

Apple the big winner!

Spooktacular

With Halloween just around the corner, I searched for some silly/spooky stories to read aloud. Between my own collection and the one at my local public library, I had a full bag of books, and I had fun reading through them all to find the ones that would work best with each grade level.

Since I had 4th and 5th graders help out with my last display, I wanted to have different students help me out with a new display. I found the perfect tie-in with one of my recent favorites for this time of year, Creepy Carrots by Aaron Reynolds.