This week, we reviewed nouns and verbs to get ready to write our cinquain poems. We wrote them about our favorite fairy tale or folktale character from our shared reading and read aloud books. Then the kids made their characters out of construction paper. We loved this project, because the characters look so cute hanging on our boards, and the kids had fun making them.
Our students are becoming so successful with identifying and writing about the theme and the lesson of a story. We have spent a lot of time getting evidence from the text to support our ideas and thoughts about a story, so when it came time to find evidence to support the theme and lesson of The Rough Face Girl, our students were able to manage this task. They were able to decipher which events in the tale best matched the lesson.
Throughout the fairy tale unit, we have talked to our students about symbolism. They love identifying the symbols in stories, and now whenever they see something that is red or dark, they immediately think it is a symbol of danger. In The Rough Face Girl, we identified the theme as humbleness. To go along our writing, we decided to create a symbol that represented this theme, as well as the protagonist of the story. We came up with a heart. We know the illustrations of a story can give us lots of information, so we wanted our students to look closely at the illustrations in this book and find ones that represented the protagonist's humbleness. They then drew those illustrations on their heart.
Have a great weekend! It is supposed to be close to 55 degrees here in Lombard! Yea!!!
Kim and Anne
