It's SIP day here for us. The morning began with a presentation from Pat Donahue from Mawi Learning. He was outstanding and talked all about a growth mindset, which is our school's theme this year. We thought we would share some of our activities this week during our lunch break now. With that in mind, please have a growth mindset with some of the student work this week.
After all of our poetry reading, and learning about some poetry devices we introduced a new genre of poetry to the students- narrative poems. These poems tell a story and have literary elements as well as poetic devices. The first narrative poem we read was called, Wonton, A Cat Tale Told in Haiku by Lee Ward. We used this book to talk about point of view. Our discussions led to understanding not only the main character's point of view, but also a minor character's point of view. After a close reading to infer what the boy, who was the minor character was thinking, we wrote a haiku from his point of view. The students loved trying to brainstorm phrases that matched 5-7-5 syllable pattern.
From that narrative poem we moved on to When Charlie McButton Lost Power, another narrative poem. This was a challenging text, and it took awhile for the students to realize that this was a narrative poem. After much discussion, we identified literary elements and poetic devices. We used the literary elements to write a story pyramid. This was a fun way for the students to reformat the literary elements to solidify their understanding.
We aren't ready to post this yet, but this week we also split our students into two different shared reading groups to read more complex narrative poetry. The students were required to do several close readings of different stanzas to understand what was happening and what the characters' points of view were. We will finish that project next week and share it with you.
Kim came across an article titled, "How to Choose the Perfect Passage for Close Reading" from the site We Are Teachers. Close reading lends itself well to shorter texts, but there is so much quality literature that we still want our students exposed to. There are many places or parts of the story where it still important for students to close read to gain a deeper understanding of what is happening, and a deeper connection to the characters. A close read also allows the reader to think about the craft and structure of the literature. We think the ideas in this article can be adapted to any grade level.
Well, we are off to our afternoon meetings! Have a great long weekend if you celebrate Columbus Day on Monday!
Kim and Anne
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