This week: UOI - writing -reading

The read aloud for the unit this week had two books:

Miss Rumphius is a story about a girl growing up and fulfilling two of her dreams - to go to faraway places and to live by the sea. All the time she keeps in her mind her grandfather's advice, "You must do something to make the world beautiful." She will make this happen also.

The Wartville Wizard is a story about an old man who works hard to keep his village clean. When he sees that people make more trash than he can clean, he gets tired and is gifted a magical power. Can you imagine what happens when he sends the trash back and sticks it to the person who created it?

The writing for this week reached the publishing phase of the writing process. The students had a choice on how to publish their texts - either on paper (a picture book, a comic book, a pop-up book, a flap-book, a shape book) or digitally (using Scribble Press, Cute Cut or Book creator.) Majority of the class decided to Book Creator.

In addition to the book creating we spent time discussing the reasons for having this unit, and identifying what our class and school community is doing already to support sustainability and what are some issues we notice. The best part of these discussions is to see the students actively thinking what is something we could actually do, not just talk about, to make change happen.

Writing through a mask

For the past two days I have read aloud poems that have been written from a point of a view of an object, like tree, a sun, a plant, a book etc. 

It's like a poet has put on a mask and imagined oneself as whatever or whomever they would like to be. Thinking about the actions, feelings, thoughts, dreams, wishes, fears of the object or character, the poet has collected the material for the poem. The students tried a similar exercise. The next step for them is to choose the essential and write an initial draft. 

Poems about animals

For the next two weeks at least we will continue reading and writing poetry. Today I shared different poems about animals. I read several poems about the same animal. It is amazing how differently the poets can write about the same topic, some playing with rhyme, some with rhythm, some with images, and some have complicated ideas hidden in their words. 

Now it was the students' turn to think and get started with some animal poetry. The key to it was not thinking about writing poetry, but rather envisioning a specific animal and collecting words, phrases, and images about it. The next step is to use the collected bits to combine and revise them into a poem.

This week: in the words of the students

 This is what the students say about learning this week:


Assessment:

This week we had our three MAP tests. First we had reading, then we had math, then language. When we have our MAP tests we have to sit quietly and take our time. When we are done, we raise our hand and the teacher takes our score, then we take our books and read until everyone has finished. The MAP tests make your brain ache. The challenge on a MAP test is that it asks you questions you haven't learned because the test doesn't know you. The test helps teachers to know how good you are, and how easy or hard things to give you.

We write reflections for the portfolio. Writing reflections is challenging because some things you have to write about are difficult like: who are you as a reader and why do you like to read...

There is not only one answer. Writing reflections makes you think harder. It is good because it helps you tell parents what you are good about. It's good for us, so we can see what we are capable of.

UOI:

Inside UOI we are making projects. Some people have partners and some people don't. Since our topic is energy, we picked a form of energy, so now we are working on the texts When we are done, we will share it with the lower school.

Reading:

This week  Ms.Terje  is reading The Tale of Despereaux for  snack/read aloud and we do work, like for example we tell the feelings of the main character. We learn how to write about reading. We think along when the teacher reads. You get to listen to a story.  This story is about bravery, about being different, and it tells you how some might feel when you treat them badly because they are different.

In independent reading people choose what they want to read, and read.

Independent reading

In Literature Circles we discuss about a book. The main idea is to be cooperative, work with a team. You need notes to make a good discussion, so you remember your ideas.

Math:

In math we learn to multiply. We practice on paper or apps on iPad. The important thing with practicing times table is that when you practice a lot, it will be in your head. Learning is about practicing and being enthusiastic.

Book Week 2014

 Book Week 2013

Our annual Book Week is about to start.
This year's theme is: Healthy Mind in Healthy Body

It will get started with a book themed slumber party this Friday night
and continue with many different events throughout next week.

Please consider volunteering for mother tongue reading. You can sign up in the lower school hallway.

Ms. Kadri as updated the ISE Book Week wiki. Take a look here.

Learning about characters

This book has two amazing characters, so I keep coming back to it each year, when we learn how readers pay attention to characters. On two days during the snack time I read it out loud to the students.

Here is what readers pay attention to when thinking about a character in order to understand the story:

Responding to a read aloud

We continued with finding different ways to respond to reading. This time the students responded with a graffiti board and recorded any thought or images that came to their mind after listening to this story:

words and pictures

mostly pictures

mostly words

Writing about reading

We like to talk about the stories we read. Spoken words disappear. We could record them, but the you need a tool  for listening. How could we record our thinking so it would be visible in a journal or in a classroom?

This week we are looking at different ways to present our thinking.

For a whole class work I purposefully use picture books. We can read the story in a shorter amount of time, they are more accessible to English language learners, and we can focus on comprehension and strategy practice.

I read:

Then students reread the text, highlighting what they thought was important or made them react and think.

Today students worked alone or with a partners to create a summary, a time-line, character comparison and thought bubbles with visuals.

Listening to beautiful language and talking about interesting stories

On busy days it may be difficult to keep to the routine of reading out loud, but we have managed. I may not have had time to read several pages from a chapter book, but it is possible to slip some poems into small pockets of time.

This book hosts a collection of poems about words, poems and books:

This book is filled with poems of apology:

This book has a wonderful combination of illustrations and poems with a twist:

In addition to the read aloud and some individual reading, we had two Literature Circle meetings. One of the groups is reading the Lightening Thief. This is a fast-paced adventure with many characters and where contemporary world is mixed with Ancient Greek mythology. I am in a group with 5th grade boys and read My Side of the Mountain. This on the other hand is a book about a boy who chose to live alone in a forest. He is learning how to survive and finds time to observe the nature and his inner thoughts. The biggest question my group is discussing is how realistic is the book and what choices would we make if we were in the boy's shoes. We will have two more weeks of Literature Circle meetings. During the third week of February we will have a book week and our schedule is mixed up. We will pause with the Literature Circles and resume after February break.

Reading like a reader, reading like a writer

Adding to our conversational skills has been the focus of reading this week. We have worked with partnersto practice how to share our thinking, how to listen to a partner, how to invite the partner to elaborate and clarify, and how to add to the conversation.

We have used both picture books and poems to dig deeper with understanding and practice how to talk about ideas. I hope that what we do in class transfers to the Literature Circle discussions.

In addition to reading like a reader, we have looked at the texts as a writer. Some books are filled with marvellous language. The book below is about a boy who has never seen a sea and his mother describes it in the most wonderful words.

What if

In this lovely book (I had read to the students some time ago) a girl named Eva is struggling with a school writing assignment. Different people on her street give her writerly advice. 

The same advice is useful for us during a revision process. Before we went on holidays the students had been working on their fictional narratives. On Tuesday I gave them their drafts to read, recommended to ask one of the greatest revision questions: "What if...?" and look for new possibilities in their drafts. This is a big question, and bold writers could change a character, a setting, a plot or the perspective they are writing from. It is a chance to turn the story upside down and make it fresh. This advice is a way to improve idea development.

The second advice from the book says: "Put poetry into your writing."

It doesn't mean writing your text in verses or inserting rhymes between paragraphs. It is meant to look closely at the word choice.

To help student to see and hear what poetic language looks and sounds like, we explored several short poems where poets have chosen simple and small or every day things and with careful word choice have created incredible images. The same literary devices can be used in narrative writing.

Isn't it beautiful when author writes about a dragonfly and calls is a sky ballerina? (metaphor)

Or what about this image "safety pin, closed, it sleeps on its side."? (personification)

Or "its tail out like a thin shrimp"? (simile)

 

These were poems (most of them by Valerie Worth) that did not have rhyme, but used the visual and sensory words and line breaks to express images.

Recent read aloud books

What do they have in common?

Here are some of the books that I have read out loud to the students. In each of these an author shares with us a memorable personal story.  Some stories are form one evening, some go over few days, some stretch over a long period of time, some have other stories as part of the big story. 

How and why did the author's choose what to write about?

We talked in class and decided that these moments and experiences must have been special and important for the writer to write about, that they included people, places, items, and feelings they wanted to remember and share. 

Then the students looked over their journal entries and marked three ideas from their elaborated lists.

They tried to think which special moments and experiences matter to them the most to remember, write and share.  

Next week we will spend more time looking at mentor texts, choosing, talking through and planning our stories. We want to envision the possibilities before we start writing the drafts.

New UOI

Ms. Helelyn, an anthropologist, came to our class to kick off our new unit of inquiry "Family Stories."

She read Patricia Polacco's The Keeping Quilt and this led us to talk about traditions, special food, and about things that are passed on from generation to generation.

An inquiry into 

Where we are in time and place

An inquiry into orientation in place and time; personal histories; homes and journeys; the discoveries, explorations and migrations of humankind; the relationships between and the interconnectedness of individuals and civilizations, from local and global perspectives.

Family stories

Central idea:

Personal and family stories provide an insight into cultural and personal identity.

Lines of inquiry:

·      Ways to find out and record about the past

·      How learning about the past generations helps to understand the relationship between the past and the present

·      Similarities and differences between generations within a family

 

Picnic

Thank you to mothers who came for a class coffee meeting yesterday. There was so much food that we had plenty to have a small class picnic today. It felt appropriate to read another Patricia Polacco's book.

More connections

We have talked about how readers activate their schema by making personal connections with experiences, feelings or relationships that are presented in a story. Another way to make connections is to think about texts by the same author, or texts on the same topic or theme, or books in the same genre. Making these kind of connections helps us to predict what to expect or understand what to pay attention to. For example, when I read Cynthia Rylant's The Relatives Came, the students soon made a connection with When Lightening Comes in a Jar and predicted that we will see the people eating, playing, taking pictures, and telling stories. Sure enough the games and food came. Knowing that in a picture book the illustrations can give us additional details, we saw that the pictures were taken in a story, even though it was never mentioned in words. 

The following day I read Fireflies by Julie Brinkloe, another connection with When Lightening Comesin a  Jar. Catching the fireflies was a similar event, but the way it started and ended was different. This showed that we have to adjust and change our schema as we read on.

Thinking beyond the text

Proficient readers use a variety of reading strategies to make sense of the text they are reading. As an adult we don't think about this, because the reading process has become unconscious.  Students benefit from explanations, modeling and practicing how to integrate the different strategies effectively with many kinds of texts.
I like to use picture books as models. During the read aloud I stop and ask the reading buddies share their thinking. This way all students have access to the same text and all students get to share their thinking. After the buddy sharing, one or two students share with the whole class. Usually they don't share what they thought, but rather what their buddy said.

Readers think within the text, beyond the text and about the text.
Thinking within the text means that the reader understands the basic meaning of the text. This is the foundation for higher thinking skills.
Thinking beyond the text means that the reader goes more deeply into the meaning, beyond the literal understanding.
One of the reading strategies, and a way to think beyond the text, is to activate a schema and make connections. Activating schema means that we use our background knowledge to help us understand the book. For example when we started reading Patricia Polacco's Thunder Cake, the students didn't know anything about the author. The next day when I showed them Patricia Polacco's When Lightening Comes in a Jar, they activated their schema and were able to tell that this author writes and illustrates her stories and that she sometimes writes about her own life.

While I read both books, the students made text-to-self connections. This means that they thought of similar events, relationships and feelings in their life. Thinking beyond the text, connecting the reading to their own experiences helps them to understand the characters better.

Learning can happen anywhere

learning about the digestive system (UOI)

A windowsill in our class is a popular place for reading and learning.

Read aloud

 

We start our day with a morning circle. We sit on a carpet and greet each other. I share what the day holds for us and sometimes give a little thought to remember. Today I read about a little girl called Vashti who was sure she couldn't draw. The teacher asked her to just draw a dot and that marked a beginning of a surprising journey.

The thought I gave after the reading:

The expert in anything was once a beginner

First day jitters

What will this year be like?

What will the students be like?

Am I ready for the new school year?

I have to admit that even after 15 years of teaching I get a bit nervous before the first day of school.

I shouldn't have been.

The smiling faces reassured me that everything was going to be great.

The energy that filled the room promised an exciting learning journey for us all. 

This week we are building our community. First of all we will learn about each other and create essential agreements to ensure a positive and supportive learning environment. The second important learning is putting routines and procedures in place. 

I shared my two (yes, only two, but very important) expectations. 

Be kind

Learn

We will have many discussions to make sure we understand what these expectations mean, and what they look, sound and feel like. 

The first two read aloud books were:

We decided that none of us were as nervous as Sarah in this story

If you wish to take a look at our read aloud books, come and visit us