We missed everyone last week. We were so extremely busy with things in our personal lives we had no choice but to skip writing our blog. We don't like to miss a week of writing, but sometimes life just gets in the way. It feels great to be back on our regular blogging schedule, and we have a few fun activities to share with you.
After reading aloud The Wild Things by Maurice Sendak, the students wrote a narrative piece about a time they were wild. It did not matter if they wrote about being wild with rage or wild with excitement. Boy, did we hear some stories!!! The best one was a kid who wanted candy so badly on Halloween that he stole 10 Kit Kats from an outside bowl when he was only supposed to take one. We laughed so hard because they are so honest. This writing lesson was adapted from Amy Lemons. She has a great website if you want to check it out. She also has wonderful lessons on TeachersPayTeachers.
For the past four weeks we have been reading nonfiction texts, in guided reading, to help us become aware of some of the features of this genre, as well as descriptive text structure. To reinforce various text features found in informational texts, we listened to a text features song we found on Kristina Smekens' website. The kids loved it and could not stop singing it. Our culminating activity was having each guided reading group create an informational text page using information they learned in their guided reading books. These pages included various features of nonfiction texts. This activity also reinforced the concept of main idea and details.
This was a great lead in to discussing other text structures such as compare and contrast, description, and chronological order. We found a great resource at Kristina Smekens' workshop filled with texts written with different text structures. These texts are short and can be read and discussed within one guided reading session.
Last summer AimsEducation sent out a free math lesson called Raisin Boxes and we have been anxious to use it with our kids ever since. It is a great lesson on collecting data, creating a line plot, analyzing data and finding the median, mode and range of the data. Our students really enjoyed it, and we think they are beginning to understand how to use data to understand information. For instance, we learned that Sun Maid raisins had more raisins in their boxes than the generic brand. When asked which brand of raisins they would buy, some responded "Sun Maid, because there's more raisins," but others said, "The generic brand because I can't stand raisins and wouldn't want to eat that many." They are so funny and always surprising us. We just assumed all the kids would say they would buy the brand with more raisins, never thinking if you don't like raisins you don't want that many.
Enjoy the weekend and we will talk to you next week on the blog.
Kim and Anne
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