Conversations

I think that conversation is such an important part of a classroom.  I love it when our room is filled with conversation.  During read aloud we will constantly have students turn and talk about the book we are reading.  I think these conversations help with comprehension.  Students can bounce ideas off other students, they can hear different view points, or they can allow students to confirm an idea they have about the book.

One of my favorite ways to spark a conversation is with a silent conversation.  We have used these silent conversations a few times before and I have even blogged about using them before.  The idea of a silent conversation is simple...students have a conversation on paper.  One student writes an idea onto a piece of paper.  That piece of paper gets passed around the circle with other pieces of paper.  Students think about what other students have written and then add their thinking to the pages.

I think these silent conversations really allow some reluctant students to enter into a conversation.  I also love how the silent conversation allows students to disagree with others or even with me.  Too often I think students (while at school) are reluctant to disagree.  During our silent conversations students disagree in such a respectful way.  I hope the more we practice these silent conversations the more we will see these skills translate into our other types of conversation.

The silent conversation we had today centered around Hercules.  Some of the conversations revolved around what was Hercules hardest labor, is Hercules a hero, can heroes do bad things, and why does Hercules keep stealing even though he knows it is wrong.  It was so much fun to see how these different ideas forced students to share what they had learned from their reading and then add their own thinking to that text.

Today before school even started I got to have a great conversation about the book Notebook Know How by Aimee Buckner.

This is a book that a few of us Language Arts teachers have got together to read and discuss.  Today our discussion centered around the idea of helping students find ideas in their writer's notebooks and then get those ideas ready to draft.  It was great to hear what different teachers do to help their students think about how the ideas they have been creating in their notebook could be turned into projects.   

I hope you are all staying warm and having a great start to your week. 

Looking at Graphics

Today we started to talk a little about the upcoming Winter Olympics.  The newest Time for Kids has some great articles.  We did not have time to look at the whole magazine so we started by looking at a bar graph.  The bar graph showed the five most expensive olympics.  I was surprised to learn that Sochi was at the top of the list almost spending 50 billion dollars.

The class analyzed the chart and I simply asked them to tell me something that they noticed.  In an instant they all seemed to notice that the spending was increasing as the games became more modern.  This was simple to see, but then I asked the students to come up with reasons why the cost of Olympics was on the rise.  The answers blew me away:  newer technology might be used which would be more expensive, cameras are now HD cameras and might cost more, the countries might be having to make the events safer which would cost more money, more people might be coming to the games which would mean bigger venues which would cost more money, and the answer that amazed me security is being increased at Sochi which might be the reason for the high cost.

Then in Social Studies we continued to talk about federalism.  The class looked at this triple Venn Diagram.

I realize that might be small but this is a great visual text that shows how powers are divided between the different levels of our government.  Again I was amazed to see how quickly the class was able to comprehend this complex text.  

I love how we continue to look at these types of texts but also can still spend time reading more traditional texts in our class.  I know when I was younger when I did my at home reading it was always straight out of a book, but do not forget other types of texts.  If you find a great graph or pie chart in the newspaper, you might read that one night for your nightly reading.  I know I keep finding more and more of these examples of texts in all kinds of publications.  

I hope you are all having a great start to your week.

Souper Bowl

Tomorrow at Donovan the teachers all bring in soup and we have a Souper Bowl party.  Get it a "Souper Bowl" party.  I will not lie...I love this day.  Any excuse to get to sit and eat a bunch of different soups with breads sounds great to me.  Of course on the day we have hot soup served it is going to be the hottest it has been in the last thirty days.  I just finished my chili and it seems like it might be a good batch.

Tonight I have been working on finding a few infographics that we are going to use to look at the real Super Bowl and the separation of powers in our government.  I love looking at infographs.  I just found infographs a few years ago but I love how they show information in a visual way.  Here is an example of an infograph about vinyl records.

Sorry I realize that might now show up perfectly on the blog.  I think these infographs are just another type of text that students have to learn to read.  It also allows us to look at different types of charts and graphs.  I find the information inside of the infographs amazing.  For example one of the infographs that we are going to look at tomorrow claims that enough guacamole is going to be consumed on Sunday to cover a football field at a depth of 11.8 feet.  That is insane, but to be honest I know how much guacamole I will be eating so it might not be that implausible.  

I need to keep it short tonight.  I hope you are all having a great week.

Small Words

We have really started to work on the parts of words.  Each week now we are looking at a suffix or a prefix or a greek or latin root.  I really wanted the students to understand why we are looking at these small parts of the words, so I went searching on youtube and found this great video.

We watched this video in class last week.  I think it really helped the students understand that if they understand the smaller words or parts of a word they will be able to spell and understand bigger words.  

I have been so impressed with the class.  Obviously we have not been able to string together a large group of days.  Even with these constant breaks the class is working so hard.  Today I just started asking some rapid fire questions about the prefixes, suffixes, and greek roots that we had discussed.  It was amazing to see the retention the students were able to show me with their answers.  

Today also allowed us to get into our hero unit.  We started by reading an article about two cross country runners.  As a class we read the article and wrote our thinking all around the text.  The class shared some great thinking and I was really impressed that we also noticed some of the amazing writing from the piece.  

After reading the article we started to make a list of characteristics of a hero.  The class added that a hero is willing to help others and they might be persistent.  We will continue to add to this list of characteristics as we read more.  

Hope you are all having a great week.

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.

Newbery Medal

Today the Newbery Medal was announced and the winning book for this year was Flora and Ulysses.  I am so excited about this announcement.  A few years ago when Mr. Franz became our principal we sat at the Junior High and went around the room and shared some of our goals.  I remember my goal was to read aloud or book talk the Newbery winner to the class before it was announced.

In the past I had book talked and read aloud honor books but never the medal winner.  Last year my luck started to change.  I read the book The One and Only Ivan to my class and then it won the Newbery Medal.

This year the winner is Flora and Ulysses.  

Sorry I could not find a picture that had the medal just yet.  I love that as a class we have found this book before it was announced.  Sure we are not finished with the book, but now as we finish the book we can start to think about why this book was selected over the other amazing titles that the committee considered.  

One of the reasons that I picked to read Flora and Ulysses for our next read aloud is that it fits with the theme of our next topic in reading.  Today during reading we started to discuss our next big idea...heroes.  Over the next several weeks we are going to discuss the idea of a hero.  Today we started by having the class write about what they think makes a hero.

I was so impressed with the writing/thinking around the room.  Two students who shared at the rocking chair shared a common idea.  To paraphrase their thinking, "a hero does not have to wear a costume or have gadgets or superhuman powers, they just have to help and protect others."  I loved this thinking and we just started.  I cannot wait to see where our thinking goes after thinking about this topic a bit more.  

Hope you are all having a great start to your week. 

Picture Walk

Today I had the students do a picture walk.  I found five pictures that went with an article that we were going to read about the Elk River chemical spill.  Here are just a few of the pictures that we used on our picture walk:

During the picture walk the class walked around the room and wrote down their thinking about the pictures.  Some students wrote questions or wondered about what they were seeing or just described the scene.  It was interesting to see the students try and figure out how the pictures fit together.  

After the picture walk we read an article about the chemical spill in the Elk River.  As we read the article the class was trying to figure out the 5 W's in the text.  Tomorrow we are going to have the students finish reading the article and write a news report about what happened in West Virginia.  

We have also started a new read aloud book.  Our new read aloud is Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo.  We actually started to read the book yesterday, but today we really started to get into the book.

I had started to read this book myself right before winter break.  By the time I got to the fourth chapter I had laughed out loud multiple times and knew this was going to be our next read aloud.  I hope you will ask your students about this book.  I know I love it and we are only on chapter four.  

Hope you are all staying warm and having a great week.