Color Poems, Immigrant Challenges/Contributions, & Author's Perspective!

Last week, we continued to work on our color poems in Writer's Workshop. Prior to peer conferencing, I had students circle 5 words in their poems that they weren't sure of in terms of the spelling. I also had them put a question mark next to the two phrases in their poem they thought they could make better with the help of a peer. By doing this, students had specific areas in their poems to work on with one another.

Over the past two weeks, I've taught several lessons on how to use a dictionary successfully (those darn guide words are tricky, aren't they?!) During students' color poem peer conferences, pairs used dictionaries and their Quick Word books to find the correct spellings for the words each student circled in his or her poem. (Note: Some kids needed help spelling more than 5 words. For the sake of making peer conferencing a manageable task, pairs only had to tackle 5 from each poem together. Adult help was given for the rest of the words.)

After peer conferences, students poems looked very ... COLORFUL! You can see this writer's original ideas in pencil, her own revisions adding adjectives and extending her ideas in red, and fixes made during her peer conference in blue.

Now that their poems had been taken through the writing process, I had students publish their poems in our computer lab to learn that word processingt is another way to publish writing. Students are learning typing skills during IMC time with Mrs. Barels - our awesome library media specialist. They are getting faster and faster with word processing! (Note: I encourage students to wear their headphones while typing to help eliminate distractions and extra talking. I highly recommend it!)

 

I also taught students to insert a text box and fill it with their color using the paint tool and use the 3D word art tool to type the name of their color. I plan to have students put a little flap over the name of their color so their audience will truly have to infer the color they are writing about before peeking at the answer. Students poems were proofread by an adult prior to printing (this one still needs an adult eye!) ;)

In social studies, we are continuing to use our leveled immigration readers to learn more about the reasons immigrants left their homelands, the challenges they faced, and the contributions they've made to American society. The texts below came from National Geographic. I love them because the look of the books is the same, as are the three main ideas discussed in each of the books. It's the complexity of the content that is differentiated, allowing ALL students to access information at their independent reading level. Yay!

For this lesson, I had students use a two-column note-taking technique to record important information. In one column, students listed the challenges their immigrant group had on their journey to America. In the other column, students listed the challenges their immigrant group had in America. Again, each student was given a reader that was appropriate for their independent reading level.


After students finished recording the challenges for their specific immigrant group, they met with everyone else who read about the same group of immigrants to compare information and make revisions to their notes, if needed.

 Here's a clip of some of the groups as they discuss their immigrant groups. It's a little hard to hear what they're saying but I assure you they were focused on the topic (immigrant challenges).

The next day, I showed students how to organize their information using an electronic note-taking program called Kidspiration.

Here is one student's graphic organizer on the challenges Chinese immigrants faced on their journey to America and the challenges they faced once they got here.

In a final lesson last week, students read the four pages from their reader that discussed the ways their immigrants have contributed to American society. By looking at students' graphic organizers, I could easily monitor the kind of information students were deeming important and support students who needed me the most.

Here is one student's web on how German-Jewish immigrants have contributed to American society! I could tell this student understood that German-Jewish immigrants have written books and music, made films, shared their knowledge and skills, and contributed to medicine, biology, and inventions. At the time I took this picture, he was adding in the names of specific German-Jewish immigrants and linking their names to the appropriate bubble on the web.

In reading, we are continuing on with explicit mini-lessons on determining importance. On Friday, I taught students that when reading a piece of non-fiction text, good readers should:

• Identify the the main idea
• Infer the author's opinion and perspective about the topic
• Think about their own opinion in comparison to the author's

I used an article called Can Kids Stop Kids From Smoking? (from the Comprehension Toolkit by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis). I modeled how to analyze each section of the article to pull out the main idea and thought aloud about what I believed the author's opinion was of the topic of kids smoking. I also thought aloud about my own opinion and how it compared to the author's. Finally, I revealed my own written response to pull all my thinking together. I colored coded each section of my response so my students could see each of the three sections of my response.

For guided practice, I gave students a different article called Turn It Off! The article focuses on TV Turnoff Week (which just happens to be this coming week!).

 

Students read the article and thought about the main idea, the author's opinion, and their own opinions regarding TV Turnoff Week. Students wrote their own response to the article in the My Thinking tab of their Thoughtful Logs to help me assess their ability to think about main idea and author's perspective. I left my own modeled response up on the SMARTboard as a scaffold for students while they worked independently.

Here is one student's response. You can see she was able to pull out the main idea, identify the author's perspective about the topic, and think critically about her own opinion. When I conference with her, I will applaud her ability to do these three tasks as a reader of non-fiction. My teaching point will be to stress the importance of rereading her writing to make sure it makes sense from beginning to end. :)

Lastly, Casey was person of the week this week. He brought in his dog, Trevor, for us to enjoy! It was a wonderful way to end the week!

 

Painting Pictures and Inferring with Poetry & a Differentiated Immigrant Lesson

As we continue to learn more and more about poetry, we continue to add more and more to our anchor chart!

Last week, I read the book Twilight Comes Twice by Ralph Fletcher as a mentor text for the idea that poetry paints pictures with words. I created a Thoughtful Log prompt sheet to help students expand this idea in their Thoughtful Logs. I pulled two stanzas from the book and asked students to draw the picture that came into their mind when they read the stanzas. Here are some of their visual reflections! (Note: Require kids to use colored pencils and encourage them to blend colors and use the shading techniques they've hopefully learned in art class. I think the blending really helped to capture the beauty in the kids' pictures.)

On a different day last week, we also discussed that when you read poetry, you will often need to INFER to understand the poem at a deeper level. I modeled this by first analyzing clues in a poem:

 I highlighted the clues that helped me infer who the author was writing to in this poem and recorded my thoughts. As the poem went on, I got a clearer and clearer picture in my head! A hamster!

For guided practice, I gave students a different poem and had students highlight the clues that helped them infer the topic of the poem.

 Students also were encouraged to record their inferences as they read so I could see evidence of their inferences changing over time.

 Then I had students draw a picture of what they believed the topic of the poem was. If students truly paid attention to ALL of the clues, they would have drawn a group of baby bunnies like these students did:


Some students thought the topic was baby mice...


 But if they had truly read and thought about all of the clues, the 'ears in a tangle' clue is what truly helps to clarify the topic of the poem.

After our lesson, I challenged students to write a poem in which the audience would need to infer what the topic is just based on the clues. Here were some of their poems. Can you infer the topic?

This student even played with the shape of his words (which was something we had anchored on our poetry anchor chart earlier last week too!):

 This student wrote clues to describe a character from the Warriors series (which many kids in my class are obsessed with, by the way!):

Last week we also started writing color poems to continue practicing the idea that when we write poetry, we want to appeal to our audience's senses and require them to infer! I modeled this by selecting a color and recording nouns for things we see, taste, feel, smell, and hear that are associated with that color. (Eventually we will delete the color name when we revise and publish, but for now, it help kids stay in the frame of mind of the color they selected.)

Students then selected a color of their own. I encouraged basic colors only (since it's hard to come up with a lot of ideas for mauve or lime green, etc.!) When students got to the part of their pre-writing sheet where it asked them to record feelings associated with their colors, students referred to their Thoughtful Logs where we had recorded ideas from Dr. Seuss' Many Colored Days mentor text. It was a great resource to link students with their prior learning!

Here are a few samples after day one:

Today during Writer's Workshop, I modeled how to revise our initial ideas by adding descriptive adjectives before our nouns and extending each idea into a phrase.

Tomorrow we will conference with our peers, and on Wednesday we will publish in the computer lab!

*****

In Social Studies last week, we read the story The Whispering Cloth by Peggy Dietz Shea to discuss the emigration of refugees from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand.

I used this slide to explain the historical context for the story. (And yes, I noticed I spelled 'clothes' instead of 'cloths' in the last sentence! ARGH!)

I had students glue the following chart into their Thoughtful Logs. In a previous lesson, I had modeled for students how to record facts from a text and respond, and students completed a chart similar to this one for guided practice. To continue on with the gradual release of responsibility, I didn't record anything while reading this book. Instead, students were responsible for pulling out and recording important information and responding as we read together.

Here are some of the great responses students recorded during our lesson:

Today in Social Studies, I handed out leveled readers to all my students. Four immigrant groups were featured in the readers: Mexican, Irish, Chinese, and German-Jewish. What's great about these readers is that they are organized identically but their content and complexity are different. You can see in the group below, one student is reading about the Irish, another is reading about German-Jewish immigrants, another is reading about the Chinese, and the fourth student is reading about Mexican immigrants! (Thank you, National Geographic, for designing readers this way!)

All students read pgs. 6 - 9 in their readers and made a graphic organizer in their Thoughtful Logs to record all the reasons their immigrant group left their homeland. Students were told they would be responsible for teaching their peers about their immigrant group so it was important to organize their information to help them remember.

After students read their pages and created their organizers, I had them get in 'immigrant-alike' groups to compare their information and either add to or revise their graphic organizers based on their discussion of their immigrant group. These students discussed why Chinese immigrants left their homeland.

These students discussed Mexican immigrants' reasons for leaving Mexico.

These students discussed why German-Jewish immigrants left Germany.

And I worked in a more guided setting to discuss reasons Irish immigrants wanted to leave Ireland.

Then I put students in 'immigrant-different' groups. Students were in groups of 4, with each of the 4 immigrant groups represented within the group. First, students color-coded their own group's reasons for leaving. This student used green to indicate all the reasons the Irish left their homeland.

Through discussion, students added reasons to their notes using the matching color for each immigrant group based on what they learned from one another.

Here you can see this student indicates the German-Jewish immigrants reasons for leaving Germany using blue. In green, she added what she learned from her peer about Irish immigrants. New reasons were added to the page and check marks were placed next to reasons that could be categorized for more than one group!

 Through differentiation, note-taking, and social discourse, students were in charge of their own learning with each other. Tomorrow we will explore the challenges immigrants faced, using a similar format!