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.