This week

We are wrapping up our UOI "Family Stories." Students are creating  mind- maps tat show what they know now about the reasons why people tell family stories, how you can find out about the past, what could you find out and what is something they learned during this unit. 

Digital stories are half way done. Students are experimenting with adding effects, changing the sequesnce, and recording their voice. You should hear and feel the buzz of the digitalw riting workshops with Ms. Glyka.

In math students have had two opportunities to show what they have learned and know about 2-D shapes. On Friday we will have one more mental matht est and then we reflect on how well the students achieved their goal for mastering basic addition.

In reading we have talked about inferring as a reading strategy. 

Inferring allows to look beyond literal text. It is our thinking based on combination of the text, our experience, knowledge, questions, values, creativity, logic and thoughtfulness. 

When we read we can infer themes and main idea, feelings and emotions of the character, points of views, and/or lessons learned.

Each time we make an inference we can ask ourselves some guiding questions:

What is the inference I am making?

What information did I use to make the inference? 

What evidence in the book supports my inference?

How good is my thinking?

Do I need to change my thinking?

We will take time to practice the skills of inferring, expressing our thinking and using the text to support our thinking.

We have continued blogging. I just love the excitement that this experience has brought into writing. Having others commenting, having an audience besides the teacher, has made the students eager to write. Plus, thinking more of conventions.

I have sent all of you invitations to view the blog. Slice of Grade 3

Please, be kind and remember that we are still learning how to blog and comment. Your comments are very welcome.

We are getting closer to finishing the final drafts of personal narratives. Using Google Drive, the students wrote comments to each other to help with the revision process. I hope that the stories will be  ready  for publishing next week.

Revision: word choice

Revision: endings

Writes create powerful endings to leave a lasting impression on the reader.

A good ending can keep the reader thinking or carrying a feeling about the text long after it's finished. 

We looked at some different possibilities.

An ending with a message

An ending with a thought

An ending with a feeling

A surprising ending

A circular ending

Revision: transitions

What words and phrases help us to show passage of time, show two things happening at the same time, or move from one scene to another?

From: http://totallyterrificintexas.blogspot.com/2012/03/transition-words.html

Thank you, Patricia Polacco for the examples. The kids were able to recognize where these terms came from.

Revision: beginnings

Yesterday we read some beginnings from different books, looked at some collected examples and a list of possibilities for different beginnings. Then the students tried out three different leads for their own personal narratives and chose one to use intheir writing. The beginning is like an invitation. The writer has to make it interesting so the reader would wish to continue reading.

More revision

Adding dialogue to writing makes a story more livley. Today we looked at different ways one can include detail.

First I shared two of my writing examples with the students and right away they noticed how my first writing had only the spoken words in the dialogue but the second one had words and additional action to show what was happening when someone was speaking.

Then we looked how we can include how something was said or use a variation of the word "said."

Finally we looked  how the spoken words can come first, last or squeeze the speaker in between them.

Examples from: Crafting Writers by Elizabeth Hale

I haven't looked at the revised drafts yet. Tomorrow I will find out, how much of what I showed, the student chose to try out in their writing.
We will continue with revision for the next two weeks (word choice and sentence structure next week and text structure the week after.)

First draft written and moving on

On Monday we reviewed all the advice the students had put together to help the,selves to write the best first draft. The. They wrote, wrote, wrote. 

Yesterday I showed them their first drafts and pointed out what they had done well already. 

Some of them had a lot of writing, all of them had chosen a topic that mattered to them, some stories reminded me of other stories we had read ( this is a positive thing  for a young writer -  to write  like another author.)

The students already knew that writers write many drafts to revise their work to have the best possible choice of words, voice and structure.

On Monday we looked at different ways to include senses. Today we looked at different ways to include feelings and thoughts. One of the students mentioned that we should have had examples of including some older memories into our narratives. Such great writerly thinking.

After looking at the examples, the students experimented with different sentences that they could include in their personal narratives. We will explore and experiment with dialogue tomorrow.

This is just a beginning. More revision waits for us next week.

Examples from: Crafting Writers by Elizabeth Hale

Stealing from authors

Don't be alarmed by the title. When we speak about stealing from authors, we look at different texts and think about what we would like to do as the author does.

One day we looked at student work and put it in order from simple writing to great writing. What did the great writers do to make us enjoy their stories.

Today we chose parts of texts from our favorite books, read out loud to each other, discussed what made the text good, and added to our yesterday's list.

Writing this week

Last week we collected ideas for personal narratives.

This week we are getting ready to write our best first draft.

On Monday we created story mountains to remember the important parts of the story.

Yesterday we practiced some different techniques to pay attention to the details.

After thinking trough the stories in the head, most of the students had a chance to tell their stories orally. 

Tomorrow and on Friday we will look at different personal narratives written by my former students and discuss what makes one narrative better than another.

Reading as a reader, reading as a writer

 

 This week I have read the three books you see on the picture aloud to kids during the snack time. They listened to the stories and responded in their journals. I will read some more stories and then they will choose their best response to share with me. Then we will work with these texts as we have done with others, looking at what we could  change and improve to make our thinking more clear to someone who read our writing. 

I used the same three books in our writing workshop.

Together with family stories in UOI we are learning about personal narratives in Literacy.

Personal Narratives are true stories based on the experiences from the writer's life.

Writers write from their heart about what matters the most.

Over the next five weeks we will inquire into:

• what makes a good personal narrative
• how to develop ideas
• how to organize the text
• ways to revise

We have learned already that writers often make lists to collect ideas. We revisited this strategy, because lists can lead to unexpected ideas, they give possibilities and can be viewed as places to begin thinking.
To write a good list you should think big and accept all ideas.

We have written simple list before. Now we wrote elaborated lists.
Three days, three books, three lists.
Each book that  you see on the picture gave us inspiration to write a different list.

Our next step is to spend time choosing the idea, exploring mentor texts, envisioning and planning before we write our first drafts.