Short and Sweet

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Good Morning! This week we spent time writing a lesson plan to go with the story Exploring Space with an Astronaut by Patricia J. Murphy.  This story will go along nicely with our Astronomy unit at the beginning of the school year.  It was easy to focus on the target skill of main ideas and details with this story because the nonfiction text structure supported this skill.  The headings of each section gave clues as to what the main idea was.  We decided to keep the lesson short with two hands-on activities.  It includes a quick lesson on identifying the main idea using pictures and creating supporting details to go with those pictures, as well as an art activity to solidify the main ideas and details of the story.  If you're interested, check out the lesson at our TeachersPayTeachers store. Below is a preview of our lesson plan.

This week Kim and her tutoring student used the Aims lesson called Jelly Belly to review types of angles, measuring angles, fractions, decimals, and finding percentages.  It took us two sessions, but was well worth it.

Math Playground is a great website that has many higher-level math activities for students to engage in. Kim showed her student the Common Core Third Grade games.  The student decided to review finding the area and perimeter of shapes using a game called Geometry Board.  She wanted to just explore this activity since it was her first time using it and made shapes to discover the area and perimeter of them.  As you can see, the activity gives you questions to try and answer by creating shapes.

Kim and her reading student have finished reading Middle School: My Brother Is A Big Fat Liar by James Patterson.  To prompt a discussion about the chapters they both read at home, Kim made a Jeopardy game .  Her student enjoyed playing it and told her that he and his classmates would play this same game during Battle of the Books, which was an extra curricular reading club.

We came upon this very interesting article while browsing twitter.  It is called "Planting Seeds for Fiction, One Fact at a Time."   It gave us a new direction on how to help students generate ideas in writing workshop.  We were inspired by this article because it linked nonfiction reading to fictional writing.  This is a perfect combination because many of our boys are interested in reading nonfiction materials and both boys and girls prefer to write fiction stories.  This article helps tie the two genres together so students have a coherent, believable piece of writing rather than one that loses its focus.  We look forward to using this idea in a guided writing lesson at the beginning of the year.

We'll see you on the blog next week!
Kim and Anne