Last Minute Decision Part 2

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Good Morning,
We know Halloween activities were promised for this post, but as usual, Anne and I changed course mid-stream.  If you read last week's post, you know that we decided to have one of our literacy groups teach the other literacy group how to write haiku poems. That went extremely well, so we are going to share some of their published poems with you. 

We did a close read of this article over several days and annotated it to make sure all of the students understood the content.
It was rigorous for all of our students!  Just what we like. :)

We are so proud of how well the students were able to demonstrate their learning by thinking about the rainforest facts in a new way.

They turned the facts into poetry! 

We believe this lesson allowed our students to use their divergent thinking skills, which is one of our main goals this year.

Writing poetry is a challenging way to look at information from a different angle.

We got further side-tracked, because we did not realize the Scholastic News article we left for our subs on Monday contained an article about the Amazon Rainforest.  My sub left me a note saying how excited my students were when reading the article. So, Anne and I decided to discuss the article further with the kids and have them practice making connections to the Time For Kids magazine article. The discussions were rich and filled with energy.  To deepen their comprehension, we had the kids write responses to the articles. I will link the sheet I used incase any of you use those same articles.  I also linked my written example to show my students.

I'm just adding the title because this is a paid subscription and I am not sure if I can share the article.

Anne and I absolutely love when we can make connections!  It takes the kids' learning and their interest to a whole new level.  All of these activities are serendipitous because they are leading us into our next read aloud.  It is the best book I have ever read!  I wrote about it on my Facebook page in July. We will reveal the title next week.  We are predicting this book will have an incredible impact on our students because of the background they have gained from reading about the Amazon rainforest.

Because we promised a post about our Halloween activities--here is a sneak peek into one of them.  Tomorrow we will be doing a STEM activity called Pumpkin Catapult. written by Carly and Adam.  I will link their TpT store here.  We are super excited about this activity because it is the kick-off to our Force and Motion science unit!!!  Again, we love when things "magically" come together.  :)

Happy Halloween!

Kim and Anne