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.  

The Second Quarter

I could not believe today was the first day of the second quarter.  Even more surprising Friday is November 1st.  And the thing that is pushing me over the edge this week is my son turns three on Sunday.  Where does all the time go?

Today we started talking about a new thinking strategy determining importance.  I love this thinking strategy.  The ability to determine if something is more important than something else seems so important.  To introduce the strategy I gave the students a problem.

In the problem they were stuck on a raft in the middle of the Pacific after their boat had sunk.  They were left with 13 items in their raft.  They had a shaving mirror, some Army rations, two boxes of chocolate bars, 20 feet of opaque plastic, mosquito netting, and some other odds and ends.  Groups had to decide which item was the most important and which item was the least important.

In other words they had to determine what was important.  The reason I think that determining importance is such an important thinking strategy is because in the world today we are constantly bombarded with information.  The better we are at sifting through that information and deciding what is important, what is interesting, and what is not important...the better prepared we are for the world.

During the conversations around the room I heard a student arguing that the mosquito netting should be number 13 (the least important).  He did an amazing job of explaining to his group that their was no need for mosquito netting in the middle of the Pacific.  He was right.  You are not going to find many mosquitos in the middle of the ocean, this item was not important.  I heard students arguing about whether the water or the food was more important.  I heard multiple students say they water was more important because you can live longer without food than you can water.

Our students are obviously off to a great start about deciding what is important.  Now I just want to show them how they can use this strategy to make them stronger readers!  If you want to know what the number one (most important) item was on our list, ask the students.  I was rather surprised by the answer.

Tomorrow we are going to start our new read aloud book.  I am a bit excited.  Hope you all had a great Monday.

Sharing and Sharing and Sharing

We continued sharing the menu board projects today.  The class was filled with mosaics, poems, book covers, Venn diagrams, and so much more.  It is so fun to see all the differences in the projects.  The students seemed excited and proud to share their work.

Sharing is also a big part of our writing time.  Each day when we finish writing we try to find time to share what we wrote.  Both classes are always so willing to share their words.  We have been talking about when we share our writing during our Cynthia Rylant unit we should be able to hear a bit of Cynthia in the writing.

Today was a perfect example.  We had a student share a piece of writing about Star Wars.  The piece started with, "In a galaxy far, far away..."  As the piece continued you could see tiny little pieces of Cynthia Rylant's writing in the piece.

In class today we had read Rylant's book The Wonderful Happens.

This story has a line weaved throughout the text:  and then the wonderful happens.  It was amazing how this student was able to weave this line into his story about Star Wars.  This was just one of many examples of how the class has been using Cynthia Rylant's writing to improve their writing.

I cannot wait to see the projects that the class creates when we are ready to take these ideas a bit further.

Hope you are all having a great week.

The Break is Over

Such a nice day to come back to school...rainy and cold and dark and dreary.

We are back, though, and it was nice to get back to work.  Today we started to read a newspaper about using maps.  One of my favorite comments was someone picking up the newspaper and saying, "I feel like my dad."

We are going to continue to look through and talk about the newspaper the rest of this week.  If you want to, you can find the newspaper in the social studies folder.

The class also got a chance to share their projects that they completed with their Charlotte's Web/The One and Only Ivan menu boards.  I loved getting the chance to walk around the room and see some of the projects.  I was amazed by some of the writing that went with these projects.  Today I saw some great I am What I Am poems and was blown away by some of the obituaries.  I am hoping to get a few photos of these projects so I can share them on the blog.

Not everyone has got a chance to share their projects, yet.  I am hoping by Friday the whole class will have had a chance to share their work.

Finally we continued to look at Cynthia Rylant as an author.  Today we read the book Tulip Sees America.

I loved how this book had a simple structure that we could easily follow.  I have been having the class look at certain pages of the book and notice certain parts of Cynthia's writing.  We are getting better and better at noticing the amazing things that Rylant does as an author.  When the students are sharing their writing, I can hear how they are using what they notice as a reader to make them better authors.  

I hope you are talking to the students about Cynthia Rylant or asking them to share their writing with you.  The writing is spectacular.  When they are done sharing, ask them how they tried to make that writing like Cynthia's.  

I cannot believe it is already Wednesday.  Hope you are all having a great week.

Looking for Answers

Today we read an article called Big, Hairy Spiders on the Move.  Before we read the article, I had the students just look at the title (it is a great title).  As we looked at the title we made a list of questions that we thought we could answer while reading the text.  I love this idea of asking questions that you think you can answer while reading the text.  The class made an amazing list of questions: How big are the spiders?  Where are the spiders going?  Were the spiders poisonous?

Then we read the article and searched for the answers to our questions.

http://tweentribune.com/junior/big-hairy-spiders-are-move

Here is a link to the article if you want to read the text.  This idea of always finding our answers or evidence in text is going to be something that we try to teach all year long.  We are going to keep using this title-question-search strategy when we read articles.  If you want to reinforce this strategy, you could have our students practice it at home when they are reading.  

We also continued to look at Cynthia Rylant's writing.

Here is the book that we read today.  I love this book.  We talked about how Rylant structured the book  going from room to room.  She talked about the PORCH and then LIVING ROOM and then the KITCHEN and then she kept going through the house.  Tomorrow we are going to try and write using this room to room structure in our writer's notebooks.  

Cynthia Rylant

Today we read another Cynthia Rylant book.  So far this week we have read...

I have really enjoyed reading her books aloud to the class.  After we read Scarecrow today we looked at some of the sentences that Rylant used in this book.  Here is one of the sentences that we looked at, "His hat is borrowed, his suit is borrowed, his hands are borrowed, even his head is borrowed.  And his eyes probably come out of someone's drawer."  

As we looked at the sentences from The Relatives Came and Scarecrow I asked the students to read like a writer.  This is going to be a term that we try to use all year long.  Reading like a writer to me would be like watching a basketball game with Lebron James or going to a concert with Paul McCartney...they are going to notice things that I do not notice.  I want our student to get good at noticing things that a writer uses to make their writing interesting.  Once they notice these things they can try to use them in their writing.

In class today we had students trying two Cynthia Rylant sentences.  We even came up with names for the things we were noticing in her writing.  We are going to call the sentence above an "Echo Sentences" and another technique is going to be called "The Andpeater 3000."  It is amazing to see how quickly the students can see these techniques and then fit them in their writing.  We had one piece about gymnastics that was a perfect example of how writing can become more interesting when you are using other authors as your teachers.  

This is the same technique we are using with our book reviews.  By looking at the four book review examples that I gave to the class we were able to figure out how to write a book review.  We started to put together our final drafts of our book reviews today.  The class had practiced writing the hook and then the summary section and then the ending of the book review in class.  They are not going to work to fit these pieces of the project together and give me their first book review.  

You can find the sentences from Cynthia Rylant in their writing folder.  You can also find their book reviews in their writer's notebook.  Hopefully you can see how they used the book reviews and Cynthia Rylant's words to make their writing shine.