State of our Classroom

Perfect night to fill you in on the state of our classroom.  If I had to pick just one word to describe our classroom right now it would be transition.

In social studies we are transitioning from learning about early Ohio history to government.  I love our unit on government.  In fourth grade we study state government.  We will dive into the topics of the different levels of government (federalism), the branches of government, the powers given to state government, voting requirements, the role of citizens, and much more.  One thing that I love about teaching about our government is that we will be reading selections of the U.S. Constitution and the Ohio Constitution.  I know these documents can seem daunting but we look at small sections of the text to determine their meaning.

In writing we are soon going to be transitioning from learning about poetry to looking at text structures that authors use.  I am excited for this unit.  I have never really taught a unit that was centered around text structures.  I think that giving the class the opportunity to look at how authors organize their non-fiction writing will allow them to think about why authors decide to use these different structures.  It will also allow students to understand that there are different options to present the information that they are trying to share.

In reading we are transitioning from learning about how Native Americans talked about the earth and sky to learning about heroes.  Yesterday I talked about how we started having students think about what they thought made a hero a hero.  Now we are going to jump right into the unit learning about heroes from the past and present in literature and real life.

Our last transition is that we just started a new read aloud last week.  The book is a change from the other types of books we have read aloud this year.  In the book Flora and Ulysses Kate DiCamillo and the illustrator K.G. Campbell include comic book pages along with the text.  Comics or graphic novels have become a very popular form of text in the last few years.  As I mentioned yesterday this book just won the Newbery medal award.  I got to tell the class the news of the award yesterday and they were extremely excited.  I have just found a group of interviews with Katie DiCamillo and I cannot wait to share them with the class.

I am so excited to get these transitions underway over the next few weeks.  I hope the students have been able to rest up over these extra few days because we are going to get to work.

Hope that you are having a great week.