Friday was our 100th day of school! We can hardly believe how quickly this year is flying by. As promised in our last blog, we want to share with you some of our Anansi activities from the week.
We began reading aloud Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock. We focused on the strategy of questioning. We stopped reading at various points in the story so students could ask questions, while we recorded them on paper. During this time, we also modeled thicker questions in hopes some of the students would do the same. Naturally, and thank goodness, our students also applied other reading strategies such as predicting and inferring. After completing the story, we analyzed our questions, and tried to decide which questions were thin and which ones were thick.
The next day, at read aloud time, we showed the students the cover of Anansi and the Magic Stick. They all cheered. This happens every year; Anansi is a favorite character. That day our purpose for reading was to begin analyzing Anansi as a character. This is going to prepare them for our culminating activity where they have to write an extended response to the question, "Would you want Anansi as a friend?" After reading, we created a character web of Anansi. The kids had no problem coming up with plenty of descriptive traits.
That same day, during shared reading, we read Anansi Goes Fishing. Boy this was a tough story for the kids to comprehend because of the play on words. We really had to read those first two pages closely so the kids really understood what Turtle was saying and how he twisted his words to trick Anansi. The kids actually felt badly for Anansi. The following day, the students partner read Anansi Goes Fishing and their purpose was to find the seven most important plot events in the story. Together we wrote a summary of the story. Then the fun came--the students used register tape to illustrate our summary and made a clay sculpture of Anansi. When the project was completed they used the iPads to recored themselves retelling the summary using their picture and sculpture. The challenge was to retell the summary to as many people as they could at home. Our winner retold the summary 20 times!!!!
The great thing about our partnership is that we share our kids. So Thursday and Friday we divided our students so they could read another Anansi story during shared reading. Thankfully, we kept 12 copies of the second and third grade anthologies from our old reading series before switching to the new one this year. Anne took some of the students to read the third-grade Anansi story which was Ananse's Feast. Kim took the rest of the students to read the second-grade story called Anansi and the Talking Melon. Our focus for both groups was to answer QAR (question-answer-relationship) questions.
Once again, the students partner read the stories with the purpose of finding important quotes from the characters. This was a new activity for us in our Anansi unit. We felt that this challenging activity would help students gain more insight into the characters and their motives. After the students found the quotes they liked, and could support their choices with quality reasons, they completed another fun project. The end result looked like this.
We know it seems like all we did was reading activities last week, but we did plenty more. The kids just loved Anansi so much we felt like our blog should be all about him. We hope you will introduce Anansi to your students because we are sure they will fall in love with him.
With the long weekend coming up, our goal is to get our complete Anansi lesson plan up on our Teachers pay Teachers store. Hope you will check it out.
Have a great week.
Kim and Anne
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