This week was filled with tons of new and exciting learning opportunities. We spent a lot of time digging deeply into the narrative poems The Spider and the Fly and Dogku.
The Spider and the Fly group did a close read on individual stanzas and tried to summarize them in everyday language. This was a challenge, but it felt good to accomplish this task.
Later in the week, the students went to the website Spaghetti Book Club--Book Review and read several of the reviews. Their task was to determine what the book reviews had in common. They found that each review included a summary of the text, an opinion about or connection to the text, and a recommendation for the text. It was then the students turn to write a poem review about The Spider and the Fly. They persevered through this challenge, and impressed us with their writing. In fact, one student said he felt like he was in junior high after doing this activity.
Our Dogku group completed a similar task. They also did a close read of the stanzas and had to summarize them in everyday language. This group then compared and contrasted this narrative poem to When Charlie McButton Lost Power, another narrative poem. This activity was not preplanned. It came about during a discussion about the mood of Dogku. The students naturally noticed similarities between the moods of each poem.
Our science lesson this week was a combination of reading, writing, and scientific discovery. We began our force and motion unit by making observations of spinning tops. The students recorded their observations, as well as questions they had about the tops. These observations led to discovering our key concepts of force, friction, gravity, position and change direction. Then the students participated in a sorting activity. We gave them the key words from our science text, and they had to group the words how they predicted they would be grouped together in the text. As soon as they were done sorting, we read the text and resorted the words. We didn't have that much resorting to do because their predictions were accurate. We think the hands-on top activity was responsible for this. To wrap the lesson up, students wrote a reflection of what they had learned about force and motion in their science journals. Surprisingly every student understands that a force is a push or a pull. Next week we are going to extend our spinning top activity and have students design their own tops. Their tops will be required to spin a minimum of 30 seconds. We'll see how it goes and report back next week.
Have a great week.
Kim and Anne
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