Friday, October 2, 2015

Hello Everyone! Happy Friday!!!  It was a wonderfully busy week here at Madison School, but we have decided to keep our blogs short and sweet, in which case we chose our favorite activity of the week to share with you.

As you know, science has been a great hit with our students this year, so we decided this past week was going to be all about Albert Einstein. We were able to cover several reading and writing skills using him as our focus.  We taught chronological text structure, how to write informational essays in chronological order, how to determine important information, and how to organize notes.

The students became fascinated with this science genius while reading several biographies about him. Some students read a one-page biography on him from My First Book of Biographies: Great Men and Women Every Child Should Know by Jean Marzollo. As a whole group, they determined which information was important and highlighted it. Other students read a more complex biography about Albert Einstein from Lives of Scientists: Experiments, Explosions (and What the Neighbors Thought) by Kathleen Krull and Kathryn Hewitt. They too had to decide which information was important enough to highlight. In small groups, all of our students read a second biography about Albert Einstein from the question-answer book titled Did it Take Creativity to find Relativity, Albert Einstein.  Again, they had to determine important information and highlight it.
Eventually, all this information was organized into notes on chart paper.

Complex Text

Just Right Text

Really messy, but that's what happens when we work hard!

From our notes on Einstein, the students used writing frames to write their own biography on this man.  We differentiated this activity for our students, but everyone was required to write their biography in chronological order with plenty of supporting details.  They loved this writing activity because they had so much background information to use.

Typical Frame
There are two pages to this frame.

Complex Frame. Required students to write several supporting details.
There are two pages to this frame.

Now that our students know Albert Einstein fairly well, we are excited to reveal our new quote of the month on Monday.  It is one of his! It says..."A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new." After we reveal the quote, we will have a discussion about what it means and how we can apply it to our lives. Then, we will sing a song that helps the meaning really hit home for kids. When it comes time to write what the quote means to them, our students hopefully will be armed with enough understanding to jot down their thoughts.

We are putting this up over Columbus Day weekend.  Hope you can check it out.

 Last month, the students really got a kick out of the bracelets and locker buttons we gave them to wear and display all month. Our students are still referring to that quote, which states "It's okay to not know, but it's not okay to not try."  It seems to help them reflect on their efforts throughout the day. If you would like all of our quotes and activities they will be up on our teacherspayteachers store after the Columbus Day holiday.

Well, we said this was going to short, but it seems we got a bit long winded.  That's usually the case with us--we love talking shop.

Until next time...
Kim and Anne