Hi everyone. It was another busy week for us. This week we challenged our students to read and engage in comprehension activities with a partner while we facilitated. We supported them as they struggled through the learning process, but in the end, everyone was proud of their accomplishments and hard work.
We spent a lot of time wrapping up the concept of day and night. When we teach our astronomy unit at the beginning of the year, this concept is very challenging for our students. We did many hands-on activities, and reading and writing activities to hopefully solidify why we have night and day. The Aims Math and Science site has a great activity called Dizzy Spells that not only teaches day and night, but also addresses where the sun is in the sky during different times of the day.
After several hands-on activities, the students went online to read about why we have day and night. Previously, we had taught the skill of sketch-to-stretch to help us visualize nonfiction information when we were reading about the sun, so this time we wanted students to apply this strategy while reading with a partner. Partners had to first read the text, and then go back for a close reading, to decide what information was important and what they needed to know. They then sketched this important information.
Our final activity with day and night was to make the well known model of the sun and earth, with the earth rotating on its axis to show night and day. Students then had to demonstrate their understanding by writing about what makes day and night in their science notebooks.
Doing a close read of A Walk in the Desert by Caroline Arnold to find the main idea and details was the next challenge for our students. Of the five paragraphs they had to analyze, two of them were done whole group. The other three were completed with a partner. Students worked hard to infer the main idea with two of the paragraphs.
You would think that all this hard work would tire our students out, but they were actually energized by their success. Thank goodness, because we were really hesitant to let them do these activities on their own. However, we know that the latest discussions about reading instruction place importance on having students working with more complex texts and tasks. It also spotlights having students engage in meaningful conversations with their peers. This promotes deep understanding of what has been read.
Our last challenge about did us in! We introduced five different kinds of leads to our students. We found books that had an example of each type of lead, and students had to work with their table mates to identify them. This was much more difficult than we thought it would be! We found ourselves literally cheering when they got one right. As if that wasn't challenging enough, we thought we would push them a little more. In their groups, they had to write their own examples of each type of lead. It was really hard, and they needed a lot of support, but we got through it! As we began our class narrative, they chose to use an Imagine This lead. Because of their independent practice, we were able to come together as a class to write a very detailed introduction to our narrative writing.
Next week is an unusual week for us. The students are off on Tuesday and Wednesday while we have School Improvement meetings, and then we are at a reading conference on Thursday. So, we will only see our students one day. In our blog next week, we will share articles and any good things we learned at the conference.
Kim and Anne
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