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. 

UOI presentation

Before the holidays the students chose one invention they wanted to learn more about. We learned how to read a paragraph, find the key words, and in our own words say what was the main message. After collecting information form various resources, they started to think how to best share the information with others. As a class they decided to use Keynote as a presentation tool.

For some it is the first time to use Keynote. The possibilities of transitions and special effects has dazzled them and maybe even distracted from thinking of the content. For those who have used it before the focus has been on creating simple memorable slides and adding detailed and engaging notes for each slide. This feature of keynote makes presenting easy. The audience sees the slides and the presenter has notes available in case he/she forgets what he/she wanted to say. 

Today we gave preliminary presentations to gain feedback and suggestions from each other.

Poetry: revision

Writing poetry follows a writing process as any other writing, from gathering ideas, pre-writing, drafting to revision and publishing.

On Monday students, the few who were at school, thought of an animal and collected ideas and phrases.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I worked with individual students ( the ones who had some text written to work with) on using the phrases and words to create a poem. The students wrote or rewrote phrases on post-its and then played around with the order of them. They read out loud to hear how the poem sounded and added, rearranged, changed or deleted words as necessary. The next step was to write the final draft on Google Drive. 

Measuring continued

We will continue with measuring this week.

Today's lesson included some review of measuring perimeter and area.

The new concept from today was: Volume.

We measured the volume of some boxes. We looked how even when the volume of the shape remains, the units affect the answer.

Using inch cubes we measured the length 9 inches, the width 5 inches and the height 6 inches and got the volume of 4x9x6=270 cube inches.

Then we took centimeter cubes and measured length 17 centimeters, width 10 centimeters and height 11 centimeters, and got volume 17x10x11=1870 cube centimeters.

The students wanted to check whether this was true and filled the box with centimeter cubes. The box fit 1 thousands block, 8 hundred flats and 7 ten sticks = 1870 centimeter cubes altogether. Yay!

Then we looked at some smaller shapes and figured out their volume by counting. Can you say how many cubic units in this shape?

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.

Journal writing tips

Before going on holidays we discussed how to improve our Slice of Life writing. The students suggested that we do some prewriting and drafting at school, and revise and publish at home.  Returnign from holidays, we had many possibilities for choosing our slice. We also learned two new strategies to help with our writing.

The first idea gathering strategy involved post-it notes. On each post-it the students drew or wrote an object, an activity, a place or a person from their holiday week.

Then we used 1-3-10 minute strategy for pre-writing. The students chose one post-it. I set the timer for one minute, they wrote. Then I set the timer for 3 minutes and they improved their 1-minute writing with adding specific details. Finally I set the timer for 10 minutes and the students revised and lengthened  their 3-minute writing.

I look forward to listening to slices on Wednesday.

Inventors and Inventions

Reading books, watching movies, the students have explored individual inventions, and are taking notes to prepare a little presentation to teach others. We have fully understood that we can not learn about everything, but there ares ome big ideas to remember.

Inventors make mistakes.

You learn by failing and making mistakes.

Inventors don't give up.

Inventing is a process.

Some inventions happen by accident.

Inventors work to make the world better.

A Daily Dose of Poetry

Daily poetry reading has brought many different kinds of poems into our reading workshop. After reading poems independently we share some of our favorites out loud. In addition the students are playing a poetry Bingo, finding certain types of poems or peoms about a specific topic. We already have some corner and diagonal game winners. No full Bingo yet. 

Jack Prelutsky is one poet whose humorous writings have entertained us. I have read to the students how Jack Prelutsky finds ideas for his poems.

Reading poetry goes hand in hand wit writing poetry. 

We have gathered some ideas and experimented with different forms.

On Monday we tried writing letter peoms to a story character.

Today we gave a try to shape poems. 

Streching our measuring muscle

Last week already the students were able to find the perimeter and area of rectangles. This week I have stretched their problem solving muscle with some perimeter and area questions.

On Monday the students had blocks to explore how you can have many shapes with the same area but different perimeters, or many shapes witht he same perimeter but different areas.

Today the students used their best problem solving skills to find the perimeter and area of complex polygons. This activity needed a bit more guidance from me to be fully understood.

In addition to finding area and perimeter we have continued practicing multiplication table. The goal is to increase the speed of automatically recalling 3 and 4 times basic facts.

Gratitude and a bit of poetry

Students created this lovely card for Ms. Tatiana who was a substitute teacher on Thursday. Each student contributed a colorful square.

I feel that this week has been like that card - colorful, with each student contributing to make it beautiful. I appreciate the enthusiasm, curiosity, creativity and cooperation the students have shown this week.

As a little weekend gift I would like to share two short poem. Inspired by Laura Purdie Salas and her 15 words or less poems. We used our FMF texts (the word was "Outside"), to choose words and play around with them to create poems. The original idea was to use less than 15 words, but it is ok for poets to work and create differently than the assigned task. The two examples show how different the approaches can be. Keep in mind that these are just the first drafts.

Outside
by M

I like to play
hide and seek,
have fun and jump
on the trampoline,
play tag and
king at a tree,
and shoot my sister
with freezing water,
because I am
her brother.


Outside
by Z

Creativity outside,
realism left behind.
Curiosity takes flight
through the sky
like a beautiful eagle
spreading its wings
for the first time ever
outside the box.

This week: in the words of the students

In the world of math, area has taken over our math unit. Since Monday our carpet has been covered in squares. Everyone has been enthusiastic in this unit. We have all understood and learned a lot.

Poetry has been ruling  over our writing/reading unit. After reading tons of poetry books we have tons of poetry knowledge. Jack Prelutsky, Shel Silverstein and Judith Viorst are poets. Poets use interesting words. They think and carefully use words to make fantabulastic poems. Whenever we read them, some of us feel like writing them when we grow up, and it gives us inner happiness.

In the wonderful world of UOI we have learned, about inventions. Since our topic is Technology and Inventions. We have learned that inventing is a process. You might fail a few times but it wil maybe turn into a invention.

Measuring perimeter and area

Estimate and measure - has been our motto in Math lessons this week. We have measured length of lines, and perimeter and area of simple rectangles. When you peek into our classroom, you will see several large rectangles made from masking tape on our floor. It has been a pleasure to see kids working together to measure the different squares and rectangles.

In addition to this we have continued practicing multiplication facts. The students have various strategies for finding the answers. Now we aim to achieve automaticity of recalling the basic facts. It means it should not take any more than three seconds to tell the answer.

Technology and inventions

What do we know already?

How we organize ourselves

Central idea

Technology and inventions impact on the world of work and leisure

Lines of inquiry

·    Technology and inventions of the home, workplace and leisure activities

·    Circumstances that led to the development of important inventions

·    How technology supports/impacts sustainability

 

Poems, poems, poems

 Baskets of poetry books greeted the students on Monday. In April we will have fun reading and writing poetry. This week we are reading, reading, reading - quietly and aloud. We are looking at what the poets write about and how they write. 

We created our own poems using an interesting technique. We used the titles of books to combine words and phrases to express ideas. As a result we had book spine poems.

Here are three examples from me:

Boy

So you want to be an explorer?
Jump right in
Splish, splash
Wish for a fish

Creatures of Earth, Sea, and Sky

Good sports

The great frog race

Splish, splash

Bing, bang, boing

Handsprings

The frogs wore red suspenders

The long, long letter,
this is just to say
wonderful words.
Days like this
I like to be me.

Student-led conferences

Thank you to everyone who came to the Student -led conferences.

I noticed a bit of nail-biting and nervous foot tapping and a lot of confident sharing from the students. I also observed active listening, patting on the back, wow-s and bravo-s from the parents.

I hope this experience gave you an overview of the many things the students have learned and done over the past months. I hope that you celebrated. I did.