Hi Everyone,
Once again it was a short week for us. Kim had committee meetings on Thursday and Friday, and Anne was out on Friday. Needless to say, we find ourselves once again in the middle of things!
One activity that we did complete was our word block/grammar lesson on conjunctions and compound sentences. We began by asking the students, "What is a conjunction?" None of them knew, but they quickly caught on while we were reading the book, If You Were a Conjunction by Nancy Loewen. After enjoying reading about the many ways conjunctions are used, we introduced the students to compound sentences, and how conjunctions can be used to connect two individual sentences. The students were then given a bag of sentences and conjunctions. They had to match the sentences, select the appropriate conjunction, and make new compound sentences.
The next day, we gave the students random pictures from the internet. They worked in partners to generate compound sentences about their picture. It was a little more challenging than we had anticipated, but everyone did a great job! These two activities were simple, and relatively quick, but really helped our students solidify their understanding of conjunctions and compound sentences. Hopefully, they will carry this into their writing, as we encourage them to not only use simple sentences, but also use compound and more complex sentences as well.
We also worked more on our narrative writing. As we were reading through some of the students' original narrative stories, we noticed most of them were not adding enough details to develop them. So, we once again looked to the Smekens website for guidance. We found two websites that have student anchor papers. We decided this would be the most effective and efficient way to help show our students how developed narratives look and sound. We highlighted and annotated the anchor papers so we could use the techniques we found in our own stories.
We not only focused on details and development, we also worked on making sure our narratives had appropriate and interesting transition words and phrases. We discussed the fact that one of the elements of narrative writing is moving the story along in chronological order, and that it is important to let the reader know when you are moving a long in time. We decided to keep a list of transition words in our writing notebooks for quick reference.
One last thing we want to mention is an App that many of you may have heard of before, but Kim just learned about it at her committee meeting yesterday. It's called Chatter Pix. Kids take pictures of objects, draw a mouth on the object, and then record their voices. When the clip is played back it looks as if the object is talking. Oodles of activities could be created that involve kids using this App to demonstrate knowledge and understanding. The first thing Kim is going to do is have her math students write and solve a multiplication problem that involves drawing arrays. The students will need to explain what the array is showing. They may want to draw a character and make it talk, or they may want to have a pencil do the talking, or most likely they will find some other object to do the talking. This will be a fun way for students to demonstrate their knowledge of what the factors in a multiplication problem mean. While this is low on Webb's Depth of Knowledge chart, knowing this information is critical to their success in future math concepts.
Here is a YouTube video explaining how to use Chatter Pix. So easy!
We hope you have a great weekend!
Kim and Anne
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