Well, the week started off a little shaky, but it ended with a bang, thanks to all of the wonderful things we learned from the Smekens Retreat last June.
Each day, we have introduced a reading strategy that good readers use, as suggested by Kristina Smekens. It has worked out beautifully! We have one more strategy to go, but today was our favorite so far!
We started with the question, What do you do when you want to bake a cake? We used props to show the connection between baking a cake and synthesizing information while you read. Then, we introduced synthesizing through a poster, and a song.
Then, came the fun part! We had asked students to bring in a bottle of Snapple. We were going to have a Snapple party! The lids of the bottles have unique facts. We wanted the students to synthesize some of these unique facts with their background knowledge. We were so pleased with the conversations the students had!
After that, we handed each student a page from the book, 101 Hidden Animals by Melvin and Gilda Berger. We had the students read the page, and try to notice new thoughts they had about the animal on their page.
The last part of today was synthesizing with the science activity we did last week. It was perfect! To give you a little background, our school theme this year is Growing a Madison Mindset. We have been learning about our brain, and how important it is to have a growth mindset. To illustrate this abstract topic with our students, we used another great Steve Spangler activity called Growing Body Parts. We placed a small polymer brain in water and continued to measure its growth for seven days. We were amazed at how it grew so large! Then, we took it out of the water, and continued measuring. It shrank.
So the challenge for the students was to synthesize these two ideas. We knew it was going to be hard, and they would have to persevere, and they did! What a great way to end the week!
We are looking forward to a restful weekend and a great next week!
Kim and Anne
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