Fort Ancient and My List Continued

Today we took some time to talk about Fort Ancient.  Fort Ancient is amazing and just a few minutes away from our school.  It is incredible to think about this important part of history just being down the road from our school.  I hoped by showing some videos that I could get the students to understand that this incredible piece of history is right in their backyard.  If you follow this link, you will be able to find some of the videos that we watched today in class.

We also wrapped up the second chapter in Poetry Matters that deals with creating image poems.

I loved the ideas that Ralph Fletcher shared with the class about creating these images.  Tomorrow we will make a poster that summarizes his ideas:

1. Write and notice the world using your five senses
2. Use similes and metaphors
3. Use personification
4. Use Symbols

Today in class we talked about symbols in poetry.  Fletcher mentions Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken.  I made sure that was the poem that I shared with the class.  When we were done we watched Kid President's Pep Talk.  If you have not seen this video, it is sure to make you smile.  The best part of the video to me is the lines about Frost's poem.

Well back to my top five moment of 2013 in room 215.

3.  Charlotte's Web  This seems like ages ago now.  When it was time to read Charlotte's Web, my room became a buzz of activity.  Some students would gather around the iTouch to listen to the chapters of the day.  Other students would meet with their partners to read the chapters.  The room was just a buzz of noise and the students were reading and talking about this incredible piece of literature.  I am big on trying to read the newest book or listen to the newest music, and I think this is why I loved our Charlotte's Web time.  Taking a moment and going back to revisit a special text was one of my favorite memories of the year.

2.  GoldieBloxs Claim  We have been building and building all year long on this idea of making and supporting a claim.  During the first week of school we watched a commercial from Volkswagon about the Fun Theory.  The class talked and discussed what Volkswagon was claiming in the commercial.  But later in the year I found my favorite commercial of the year.  

This commercial has changed since we first used it in class.  The commercial had taken lyrics from a famous song and made them work perfectly with their claim.  Unfortunately the lyrics have been removed in this version because of copyright issues.  

I was amazed to see how quickly the class understood what this commercial was trying to claim.  Then I had the students write about whether or not they agreed with the claim of the commercial.  The writing the class gave me was so much fun to read.  I cannot wait to work more on making and writing claims in 2014.

Tomorrow my favorite memory of the year.  

Hope you are all having an amazing week.

Lists Lists and More Lists

One of my favorite parts about this time of the year is end of the year lists.  I will spend most of my free time over winter break pouring over list after list.  My favorite lists are end of the year music lists.  I know some people hate these lists, but to me there is nothing better than a nice list.  I actually found this article on why we like end of the year.  My favorite part of the article is that it is a list.

I also found this list of the best picture books of 2013.

Just to add another list to your reading, here is a list of the top 100 books of 2013 from the New York Public Library.

I thought it would be fun to think about some of my favorite moments from this year.  So here is my list of our top five moments of 2013 in room 215:

5.  The silent conversation the day that we read about Stella dying in The One and Only Ivan.  I was so amazed by what the students thought that day.  Just walking around the room and reading the conversations that were occurring was astounding.  The lesson took a long time but the thinking that came out of that moment was worth every second.

4.  Share time the day we worked on I am From poems.  I love this day each and every year.  The writing that comes out of the students that day is so fun to hear.  I think my favorite part of this day is seeing how much the students seem to surprise themselves with how amazing they can write.  It is a great springboard into the rest of our writing year.  Our classroom is filled with such amazing authors and this day was just the first of many days where they showed off there writing.

I think to make this even more exciting I will announce memory number three and two tomorrow and save the number one for Thursday.

Just because I have been sharing so many lists...here is my reading list for winter break:

3.  Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo.  This might be our next read aloud.

2.  All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.  It will be so nice to read an adult book again.  I love reading this book.  Mrs. Tarr hates when I read this book, though, she says I start to dream about moving out west and becoming a rancher.

1.  Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo.  Another adult book that I have been saving to read for a long time.

If you have any other suggestions, send me the title.  I am always looking for great reads.  Hope that you are all having a great week.  

The Moon

In the book we are reading aloud Starry River of the Sky by Grace Lin the moon has been missing.  

Rendi the main character has seemed to be the only character who notices that the moon is missing.  At night Rendi struggles to sleep constantly hearing moans and groans.  Later in the book the character Madame Chang tells a story about how Wang-Yi visits the moon once every twenty-nine days to visit his wife.  

The story that Madame Chang was a pourquoi story that fit perfectly with the other pourquoi stories that we had been reading and that the students were writing themselves.  I knew as soon as we read Madame Chang's story last week that I wanted to spend this week talking about the moon.  

Today we started this study of looking at the moon by looking at a moon cycle.  

The students also got to look at a moon calendar.  The calendar shows how the moon will look throughout the month of December.  Hopefully students will step outside tonight and be able to find the moon in the sky and compare it to the moon calendar in their Earth and Sky notebook.

I cannot wait to learn more about the moon this week.  Hope you all had a great start to your week.

Images

The second chapter of Poetry Matters by Ralph Fletcher talks about how to create image filled poems.

I love this chapter because I always think the poetry that our class creates during the chapter is amazing.   The chapter starts with a quote from another poet about how poems are like snapshots.  I love this idea of poems as snapshots.  After we read the first section of the chapter, I shared a poem by Carl Sandburg called "Plowboy" with the class.

PLOWBOY

After the last red sunset glimmer,
Black on the line of a low hill rise,
Formed into moving shadows, I saw
A plowboy and two horses lined against the gray,
Plowing in the dusk the last furrow.
The turf had a gleam of brown,
And smell of soil was in the air,
And, cool and moist, a haze of April.
I shall remember you long,
Plowboy and horses against the sky in shadow.

I shall remember you and the picture
You made for me,
Turning the turf in the dusk
And haze of an April gloaming.

We have looked at this poem before but today I think the class was able to look at the poem as a snapshot.  The line, "I shall remember you and the picture you made for me," is exactly what I want the students to learn.  The world is filled with amazing images and if our authors can see these images and take mental snapshots they can write about them later.  When it was time to write, I showed the class an image of snow.  The class knew they could use the picture to help spark their writing or use their own mental image to create a poem.  

Here is just some of the writing the class shared with me today:

"every kid is playing in the bitter wind,

fingertips, ears, noses and toe tips all cold"

Love the choice of toe tips!

"As the last snow flake falls

trees are covered with snow.

They look like white monsters

running on the road"

Using a simile before we even talk about similes.  Do not worry we will talk about similes tomorrow.

"Dawn is here 

white as could possibly be

white blankets covering the dark shadow of the trees"

Love that start.  

"When the birds don't sing

when the squirrels are not in the yard

when the trees are covered in powder seats of white

                 we all know

Soft parts of clouds have fallen from the sky

and onto the world"

Again another start that just blew me away.

I cannot wait to see where we keep going with these images poems.

Hope you are all having a great week.

December 11th

Could that day be right?  This year seems to be going by so fast.  I cannot believe that in just seven more school days it will be winter break.  Not that I am counting.

We continued to talk about poetry today in class.  The class listened to a young man list things that he believed in on a recording.  The kindergartener had made a list of 100 things he believed for his 100th day of school.  I thought that the list that the boy sounded like poetry.  The class agreed that it was "poem-ish."

After that I just had to set them loose and they wrote their "I Believe" poems.  Here are just some of the "I Believe" lines that were shared today:

"I believe that every book I read is magical."

"I believe piano soothes away your worries.
  I believe the sound of a piano is magical.
  I believe that piano is a calming instrument."

"I believe the future will hold many new tales to tell
  I believe"

"I believe in trustworthy parents,
  I believe that parents are reliable,
  I believe that parents are the ones
  that will be there for us"

"I believe in writing with power and wisdom
  I believe writing is a skill not a test
  I believe writing can be anything"

It is an amazing thing to be in our room when we share our writing.  I am constantly awed by the smart, funny, beautiful, or profound things that our shared each day at our rocking chair.  I cannot wait to see where our poetry goes next.

Tomorrow we will dive into the second pillar of poetry...image.  In years past this is where I see our authors just produce amazing pieces of writing.  I cannot wait to see what I have in store tomorrow when we share at the rocking chair.

Poetry

In the book Poetry Matters Ralph Fletcher tells us that there are three pillars of poetry.  These three pillars of poetry include emotion, image and music.  In fact the first three chapters of his book deal with these three pillars.  This week we have been reading about the first pillar of poetry emotion.

According to Ralph Fletcher there are three ways to make your poems more emotional:

1. Think of the poem as an emotional X-Ray
2. Try poem speak
3. Don't say too much
4. Convey emotions through images

Today we created a poster for our writer's notebook that talked about these techniques to make our poems more emotional.  We have also been reading poems like "Lullaby" by Georgia Heard, "To You" by Karla Kuskin, and "Dreams" by Langston Hughes from the book This Place I Know.

Each of these poems, along with Langston Hughes's poem called "Poem," uses one of these techniques that Fletcher talks about in his book.  For example the poem "Poem" has less than 30 words.  I think the class understood that I picked this poem to show us an example of "Don't Say Too Much."  

I hope as we keep looking through Fletcher's book and finding more about these three pillars that the students will find ways that they can make their poems better.  I have already been amazed at the way the students have been taking these example poems and using them to create their own poetry.  

Hope that you all had a great start to your week.

What We Notice

All year long I have asked the students to tell me what they notice.  This week we have been looking at what we call FANBOYS sentences and asking the class what they notice.  Today we looked at our fourth FANBOYS sentence.  I am always amazed when you ask students to notice things what they will notice.  

We started simple.  The class noticed a comma.  By today we were noticing that on both sides of the comma there was a subject and a verb.  In just four days the class went from noticing a small comma to figuring out the sentences.  We still have not figured why we call the sentences FANBOYS and what those FANBOYS are really called, but that will come as we look at more sentences.  

I am going to keep it short tonight.  Do not forget midterms are coming home tomorrow.

Hope you are all having a great week.

Book Ideas

I thought some of you might be looking for a few books this time of year, so I wanted to give some suggestions of some great new books that are out there right now.

My first suggestion...Clementine and the Spring Trip by Sara Pennypacker.  How could you go wrong with an author with the last name Pennypacker?  This book is getting some early Newbery buzz and would be a great book to add to any collection.

Another book that I think a lot of our students would enjoy would be the book Eruption by Elizabeth Rusch.  This nonfiction book about volcano eruptions would be a great addition to any library.  Also with more and more focus being put on nonfiction reading, it might be nice to show young readers what great nonfiction can look like.

A book that I was finally able to get my hands on last week is the new book from Kate DiCamillo.  Her new book is called Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures.  I must admit I am a sucker for any Kate DiCamillo book (Because of Winn Dixie, The Magician's Elephant, and of course The Tale of Despereaux).  DiCamillo's new book did make the short list for the National Book Award.

One last title that I think our students might enjoy would be The Real Boy by Anne Ursu.  I loved Ursu's last book Breadcrumbs.  Here is a quick blurb from Amazon about The Real Boy:  

On an island on the edge of an immense sea there is a city, a forest, and a boy named Oscar. Oscar is a shop boy for the most powerful magician in the village, and spends his days in a small room in the dark cellar of his master’s shop grinding herbs and dreaming of the wizards who once lived on the island generations ago. Oscar’s world is small, but he likes it that way. The real world is vast, strange, and unpredictable. And Oscar does not quite fit in it.

But now that world is changing. Children in the city are falling ill, and something sinister lurks in the forest. Oscar has long been content to stay in his small room in the cellar, comforted in the knowledge that the magic that flows from the forest will keep his island safe. Now, even magic may not be enough to save it.

I hope these helped if you were looking for some books. 

Hope you are all having a great week.

Social Studies

In Social Studies we have been learning about the earliest people in Ohio.  So far we have studied the Paleo-Indians, the Archaic, and now the Adena and the Hopewell cultures.  I have really enjoyed learning about these groups with the students.  Right before Thanksgiving break we finished our word bracket about the Archaic people.  Here is an example of one of our brackets:

You can see this student picked the words time, forrest, stable and burial to be in his Archaic Word Bracket Final Four.  I love these four words.  They seem to be the perfect four words to describe what we learned about the Archaic. 

The word burial describes the Archaic because their culture started to bury their dead.  The word stable is picked because it describes the climate.  Once the climate stabilized forests could grow and smaller mammals were hunted.  Time was picked because the Archaic were much better hunters.  This success with hunting allowed the Archaic time to concentrate on other things besides looking for food.  With that time the Archaic started to create the arts.  They made pots and masks which were important parts of their culture.  Finally the word forrest described the new living environment of the Archaic.  

One thing that I have enjoyed about learning about these early cultures in Ohio is how it ties into what we are learning about in reading.  In reading we are continuing to discuss Native American beliefs about the earth and the sky.  This week we have been reading some Native American Pourquoi Tales.  

The word pourquoi is French and in French the word translates to why.  So far we have read Pourquoi Tales that explain why the crow has black feathers, why the porcupine has quills, and why the red bird is red.  The class has started to keep a list of characteristics that they notice about these stories.  Obviously they have noticed that the stories explain the reason for the way something is today, but the have also noticed so much more.  Today on the characteristics list we added the idea that in the stories a  character is usually being rewarded.  The rest of this week we are going to continue to read Pourquoi Tales and analyze how they are similar and different to the tales we have already read.

I hope that you are enjoying your week. 

December

I'm back.  I cannot believe that it is already December.  I know that I have already said it this year but time really seems to be flying.

Today we started to talk about poetry in writing.  I read aloud part of the book Poetry Matters by Ralph Fletcher.

I love this book.  I think it really helps students understand all the possibilities of poetry.  Today the book talked about the power of poetry.  How we read poetry at funerals, graduations, retirements, and inaugurations.  Poetry is this powerful bit of writing and hopefully I can show that to the class.

Each day for the next three weeks I will read aloud a bit from Poetry Matters and then I will share a poem.  The poem we read today was "Lullaby" by Georgia Heard.  I found the poem in the book This Place I Know: Poems of Comfort.

"Lullaby" is an interesting poem written in two stanzas and only containing questions.  We read the poem together chorally after the class listened to me read the poem.

After reading, the class went back to their seats and wrote.  I was amazed to see some of the work that was going on around the room.  Many of the students borrowed the idea of asking questions and used that in their pieces.  Others were writing poems to important people in their life.  Others were writing about winter and upcoming holidays.

I love this writing unit.  I am always amazed at the writing these students are able to produce.  If you get a chance, I hope you take time to look at the writing in the writer's notebook.  

I hope you all had a great start to the week.

Our Books

Today we kept working on our bare books.  The energy in the room was amazing.  I was so impressed with all of the work that I had to get the iPad out to snap some pictures.  These are just some of the amazing work that I saw around the room.  I know these students are waiting to add color and illustrations and so much more to these pages, but I already think they are amazing.  Here our a few examples:

Here is a great page.  I love the flattened snowball and the word Flam and the repetition of and another!

A countdown to New Year's Eve with an example of what we call the Andpeater 3000!

A book cover.  What an amazing title and I cannot wait to see the illustrations that go in the boxes.  This reminds me so much of one page from The Wonderful Happens.

They know I am a sucker for Star Wars.  I cannot wait to see this project continue.  This book uses a reveal page that I love.  Also look at the comma between far and far.  We learned about this when Cynthia Rylant would say, "green, green rolling hills."

A page in the works.  This is another student using The Wonderful Happens to create this amazing book about a farm.  It might be a little hard to read so here you go:

in a little barn

someone love animals

a little girl

the animals love her,

the animals want more love,

and the wonderful happens:

The wonderful things that happens is revealed on the next page.

I am going to try and put some more examples up tomorrow.  I hope you have a chance to see these drafts in the process.  If you have not seen them yet, force them to bring them home this weekend.

Yeah I went a little crazy with the pictures today but that was the Thanksgiving lunch you missed out on today.  Bad idea to give someone my age this much turkey and not expect him to take an afternoon nap.  

Hope you are all having a great week.

A Good Day

Today we worked on some selective highlighting.  I had seen this idea of selective highlighting presented during our last early release.  I actually had tried this strategy before today, but I had to use different color post-it notes instead of highlighters.  The inclusion of the multi-color highlighters peaked the classes interest.  I loved seeing the faces of the students as they were being passed out.  All they wanted to do was use the different colors.

The idea of selective highlighting makes students search for evidence in a text and use different colored highlighters to mark where they find that evidence.  The text we were using today was a Native American story that included a coyote.  The students hunted for evidence of the coyotes persistence, evidence of the lesson in the story, and evidence of coyotes plan backfiring.

I love this idea of selective highlighting.  I wish I had learned this when I was in school.  To bring the point across about why we use this strategy I always start by having a student hunt around the room looking for something.  The only problem is I just tell them to find me something...not what to find.  The student walks around the room picking up random objects hoping they have found the object.  Unfortunately they never find the object.  Then I call on another student and ask them to find whatever I was looking for.  The student quickly picks up the object and brings it to me.

We have a discussion as a class about who had the easier job.  Obviously they know it is the second student.  Then I try to connect this with our reading.  When readers read with a purpose, reading is easier.  When the class knows what to look for in the text their reading becomes easier.  I hope the class will understand this connection of having a purpose when they read and better reading.  You can find the text we highlighted in the reading folder and if you want you could talk about why it is covered with all the different colors.

During writing we took some time to notice what Cynthia Rylant and the publishers of her books do to create the books.  The classes created an amazing list of what they noticed in the books we had been studying for the last few weeks.  After we finished our list, I passed out the bare books.  The class is going to take their first draft, which they have been working on revising, and start to create their Cynthia Rylant-ish book in these bare books.  In one class after the bare books had been passed out I saw two students reach across their desks and high-five each other.  I love this excitement for writing. I love this excitement for school.  This is what makes my job amazing.  It was a good day.

Hope you are all having a great week.  Tomorrow is the best lunch day of the year...Thanksgiving Lunch.  If you want to join us, lunch starts at 11:20.  You will not be disappointed in the pumpkin whip.

Writing Comments

Yesterday I was able to hand back the first drafts or our Cynthia Rylant writing projects.  The students also received their comment sheet.  My hope is that the students will use these comments to work on improving their writing projects.  You can find these comment sheets in the writing folder.

I already saw the students thinking about what they wanted to add to their first draft or cut from their first draft or rework.  The students are going to start show me the changes they are planning to make for their final draft tomorrow.  The class is excited about creating their final draft in a bare book.

We also read our second coyote story today.  When we were done with the story, the students went on a pronoun hunt throughout the text.  Tomorrow we are going to look at the story again and think about how it related to our first coyote story.

I am going to keep it short tonight.  Hope you are all having a great week.

Coyote

Last week was such a great week.  I loved all the work we did with stars in Native American stories.  At the end of the week the students worked hard on a claim connecting the facts we had learned about stars to the stories that we read.

This week I want to step away from the sky and get back to the earth.  We are going to look at an animal that is part of the earth...the coyote.  All week long we are going to study how the coyote is portrayed in Native American stories.  

We got our first glimpse of coyote last week when we read the story How the Stars Fell into the Sky.

Hopefully the class will enjoy the stories we read this week, but I also hope they see the characteristics that coyote has in many of the stories that we read this week.  

We are also continuing to learn about the first groups of people in Ohio.  We have just started to learn about the Archaic Indians.  In comparing this group with the Paleo-Indians we have already noticed many changes that Ohio and the people of Ohio made to survive.

As we read about the Archaic Indians we are going to collect words for our first word bracket tournament.  I love word bracket tournaments.  All we will do is pick the eight most important words to help us describe the Archaic Indians.  Then the students will seed the words and play the words through our bracket.  

When we are done with the tournament the students will have to support their choices with evidence/reasons for their choices.  I love how these word tournaments force students to determine importance and at the same time force them to support their claims with evidence.

Hope you all had a great start to the week.

A Marathon

Today we did another marathon.  Do not worry it is not your typical marathon...it is a writing marathon.  We have done one or two writing marathons this year.  I love these little breaks during our weeks to just spend some time and write.  I think the class really likes them as well.  When we got a chance to share our writing from the marathon, almost every hand was in the air wanting to share.  Today's writing marathon was a would you rather marathon.

I asked the class a bunch of would you rather questions like: Would you rather spend the rest of your life in a library, an amusement park, or a zoo?  Would you rather be able to fly or have super speed?  Would you rather give a gift or receive a gift?  Would you rather be the strongest person in the world or the smartest person in the world?  Would you rather live where it is always 110 degrees or always 0 degrees?

The class would pick one of these choices and then they would write.  We would write for about ten minutes and then we would take a break to share our writing.  Then back to our seat for ten more minutes of writing and then some share time.  Then back to our seats for more writing and then some more share time.

The reason I wanted to do this type of writing marathon was it fit perfectly with the cartoons that we had looked at this week.  In the cartoons the author was making a claim.  Today in their writing the students were making a claim.  They were claiming that a zoo might be a better place to live than an amusement park (I would have to disagree with that claim though).  The best part of the marathon was that the students started to add evidence to support their claim.  

This type of writing and thinking is so important.  We want all of our students to be able to make a claim and support that claim with evidence.  We are going to talk about this all year long.  Each day in class we keep talking about how good readers find evidence to support their thinking inside of text.  Claim and evidence I cannot say them enough!!

Hope you are all having a great week.

Snow

Today you could tell the students were excited about the first measurable snowfall.  I know our kids were so excited this morning that both put on their snow boots before they went to Nana's house.  I don't think the boots were needed but still they crunched around in the snow when we got home tonight.  

In class we kept talking about the Paleo-Indians and sharing Native American stories.  The story we shared today came from the book The Earth Under Sky Bear's Feet.  It was a poem that explained one belief about how the stars were put into the sky.

When we were done reading the poem the class compared the poem to the book we read How the Stars Fell into the Sky.

The two stories both tell of how the stars were put into the sky but the stories are very different.  The class created a Venn Diagram to show the similarities and the differences between the two versions. 

We also kept talking about the first Native American tribe in Ohio the Clovis Paleo-Indians.  We have learned a lot about this first tribe.  We have talked about why they are called the Clovis Paleo-Indians, how they gathered and hunted food, what they used for shelter, and much more.  In the class today the groups shared with each other what they had learned by reading a section of text about the Paleo-Indians.  

Each group focused on sharing three important words to remember with the tribe, two facts about the tribe, and finally the thing they found most interesting.  I was thoroughly impressed with the words that the groups picked.  Each group was able to focus on three words that perfectly described the section that we read.  

The class was still excited to look at some new cartoons.  We looked at four new cartoons today that dealt with new technology.  I think our favorite was a cartoon depicting a family vacation.  

We talked about what we saw in the cartoon:  

• a car
• a sign (scenic route)
• the mountains
• the trees
• child texting
• child watching videos
• mom checking emails and reading on Kindle
• dad checking in at the office

After we talked about what we saw, the groups talked about what they though the claim was of the cartoon.  We all seemed to come up with different answers, but most of our answers centered around the idea that we need to put technology down every once in awhile or we might miss other things.  

Hope you are all having a great week. 

Comment Week

This week I have the first drafts of our Cynthia Rylant writing projects.  All week long I will be making comments on the writing.  Next Monday the students will get back their first draft along with a page of comments.  I hope that the students will use these comments to make their projects even better than the amazing first drafts that I have been reading.

While we are taking a week away from our writing projects, I thought we could talk a bit more about claims.  We have done a bit of making claims this year.  We started the year with our back to school claim and we have made claims about the best candy and we have made claims while writing book reviews and a few other small claim ideas.  This week I wanted to look at cartoons and see if we could find claims.  

These are the cartoons that we looked at today.  When we looked at the cartoons I just asked the class to tell me what they see.  Then I asked the groups to think about what the author was claiming.  As usual I was amazed by some of the answers.  The answers that I heard proved that the class could definitely understand the claims that these authors were making.

Our next step was to ask the class to tell me what they noticed about the cartoons.  The class quickly came up with a list that included:

• They all made a claim/had a message
• They did not have a lot of text
• You had to infer the claim
• The picture helped tell the story

When it was time to write, I told the class they could try to make their own cartoon.  A few students stepped up to the challenge.  One of my favorite cartoons made a claim about the Big Ten.  The cartoon had a huge logo for the ACC and the SEC and then a tiny logo for the Big 10.  The Big Ten logo had the text, "We want to be Big too."  Perfect and Funny!!

We are going to continue to look at cartoons this week and then have the students experiment by making their own cartoon.

The Sky

Today when we read aloud The Starry River of the Sky we heard the story about the Celestial Rooster.  The story told us how WangYi's wife figured out how to bring the sun out of the mountain.  The sun was hiding scared that the humans would shoot it down.  WangYi's wife suggested that they try to have animals call to the sun. They unsuccessfully try to use the cricket, then the tiger, then the cow, but then WangYi's wife suggests the rooster.  The rooster calls out and the sun comes out of the sky.

I liked this story and I loved the word celestial.  We went back to our seats and had a dictionary race (the groups race to see who can find the word the quickest).  When we found the word celestial, the class found it meant relating to the sky.  This was perfect because we were going to start reading about what Native Americans believed about the stars.

To do this we started to read the book The Earth Under Sky Bear's Feet.

I love this book.  It is filled with Native American poems of the land.  The poem that we read today was from the Mohawk tribe.  Before we read the poem we located where the Mohawk tribe was located in the United States on the map.  Once we finally got to the poem we worked on trying to find similarities between the Mohawk poem of Sky Bear to the story we read yesterday.

As we learn about these Native Americans stories we are also learning about the first Native Americans in Ohio.  The class started to read a magazine/newspaper about the Paleo-Indians.  You can find this magazine in the Social Studies folder.  While the students were reading one section of the magazine, we had them create a list of important words.  Here is some of the list we created as a class:

• migration
• hunters
• stone
• flint
• mastodons
• mammoths
• Ohio
• chief

The list is going to help us tomorrow as we use a strategy called Keep It or Junk It.  In Keep It or Junk It they are going to try and cut their list of about 17 words down to around 5 important words.  Then they will use these important words to help them answer a question about the Paleo-Indians.

I loved how the whole day seemed to be connected!

Hope you are all having a great week.

Rylant-ish

Wow what a great two days.

Today we started to work on our first drafts of our next writing projects.  I have been so impressed so far with the writing.  I keep telling the students that when I read these projects I want to find Cynthia Rylant-ish writing.  As the students were writing today, we started to share our writing on the document camera.

I was blown away with what the class was producing.  Each project I got to share you could see evidence of how looking at Cynthia Rylant's writing has affected these projects.  I hope you get a chance to look at these first draft projects.  If you do, make sure to ask the students to show you what they are doing like Cynthia Rylant.

We are also continuing to read Starry River of the Sky by Grace Lin.  The book is amazing.  Grace Lin tells the story by having characters tell a story in the middle of the book.  I love this story within a story structure.  The stories the characters are the most interesting part of the books so far.  One of the stories explained why there was only one sun in the sky and another story told us about why the rooster crows with the morning sun.  I hope the class is enjoying the book.

Going to keep it short tonight.  I hope you are all off to a great start to your week.

October Favorites

Sorry about not blogging last night, but with Trick or Treating and the wind storm keeping my children awake there was no time.

Today was crazy.  The Pumpkin Drop was awesome.  Our pumpkin did not make it.  The smallest of cracks was on the bottom of our pumpkin, but I still think the class had a great time.  I am hoping Mrs. Sanford is going to send me some emails with the pics and videos of our pumpkin so I can post them here on the blog.

October seems to have flown.  I thought I would just post some pictures of some of our favorite books that we finished or started in October.

Wow we got a lot of books with medals and some amazing authors!  I hope that when we finish November I can add just as many amazing books to the blog.  

I hope you all have an amazing weekend.  

Baseball

Today could be a sad day.  It could be the end of baseball.  Baseball is the perfect sport for teachers.  The pace of baseball is perfect for a night of grading or writing a blog post or looking for the perfect Native American Cinderella story.  Baseball is perfect background noise.  I love listening to The Cowboy or Joe Buck or The Hall of Famer or Tim McCarver call a game.  Baseball is peaceful and historic.

Sorry I just wanted to write a bit about baseball.

Back to our classroom.  Today we read the story The Rough-Face Girl.

This story is amazing.  In the front of the book it talks about the Cinderella story type and claims that there are over 1,500 versions of this type of story.  The students made a four square chart in their Earth and Sky reader's notebook.  In one square they were looking for facts about Native Americans, in another they were looking for all the different characters, in the next box they were looking for connections between this story and the Disney version of Cinderella, and finally in the last box they were trying to find the lesson of the story.  

Tomorrow we are going to read another version of this same story that comes from a different Native American tribe.  The students will look for similarities and differences between the two stories.  

We also continued to talk about determining importance.  One quick idea we have been doing has been listening to songs to see if we can determine the most important lines.  Yesterday we listened to "Yesterday" from the Beatles (that is a funny line), and today we listened to "A Place in this World" by Taylor Swift.  One of these songs was picked for me and the other was a song the students might like and know.  I will let you guess which song was for me.  

We were so impressed with the conversations that the groups were having about the important lines.  Then we take this idea of looking for important lines and try to connect it to the reading the students are doing in the classroom.  Earlier this week we had read an article about bats from Time for Kids.  

As a class we talked about the most important parts of the magazine.  Even today after a few days away from the article the class was able to recall the important details from the text.  We are going to keep talking about this idea of determining importance tomorrow when we look at a poem.  

Hope you are all having a great week.  

Earth and Sky

Today we started to talk about the earth and the sky.  Over the next 6 to 8 weeks we are going to be looking at how Native Americans told stories about the earth and the sky.  At the same time we are going to study the first groups of Native Americans that came to Ohio.  To kick off the unit I decided to show a video showing the beauty of earth.

As the students watched the video they wrote down what they saw in their new reader's notebook.  We also watched a video showing the night sky at Yosemite.  I wanted students to think about how the earth and sky would have looked when Native Americans would have first come to North America and Ohio.

We also took time to glue an article about Native American storytelling into our reader's notebook.  Groups were then asked to read the article using VIP post-it notes.  VIP post-it notes are VERY IMPORTANT POST-IT NOTES and we use these VIP's to mark VERY IMPORTANT PARTS of a text.  This fits with our new thinking strategy of determining importance.  

To keep with the theme of the earth and the sky I started a new read aloud book today.

This book is one of my favorites.  It is written by the amazing Grace Lin (you should check out some of  her other books including Where the Mountain Meets the Moon).  I picked the book because the story it tells weaves in Chinese Folklore.  In the book the class will hear stories about why there is only one sun in the sky and why the sun and moon come out at different times of the day.  These stories will hopefully fit right in with the stories that we will be hearing from different Native American tribes. 

Hope you are all having a great week.