Animal Research - Part 10 & Biography Genre Focus

In our last blog posting (Part 9), students finished drafting their habitat paragraphs and defense mechanism paragraphs for their non-fiction reports. Normally you would think we would write an introduction to our reports FIRST, but instead I had kids research and draft the body of their reports first so students would truly be informed on their animals. I used the slide below to help students get a better idea of the 'big picture' of their research since we've been doing our research/writing in parts.

Now that we had the body of our animal reports written (the paragraphs about habitat, diet, and defense mechanisms), it was time for students to write their introductions. A good introduction HOOKS a reader into wanting to read more!

In order to know how to write an introduction that hooks a reader, we analyzed several introductions from real non-fiction authors to see how they did it! This introduction came from a book about pelicans. We noticed that this introduction included DESCRIPTION and QUESTIONS.

This introduction came from a book on wolves. We noticed that this author also asked QUESTIONS, CONNECTED TO OUR SCHEMA, and shared SURPRISING INFORMATION.

 And in this introduction from a book on owls, the author PAYS THE ANIMAL A COMPLIMENT and INVITES THE READER to read more.

We added all this great information to our organization anchor chart we created earlier in the year. (All of our new learning is in orange.)

 To help scaffold my kiddos into writing an introduction that included all of the 'hooking characteristics' we learned from the mentor texts we analyzed, I wrote my own introduction for my own report on owls and also created a template for students.

Students wrote their own introductions using the template so that their introduction would HOOK US! This template and all the other sheets students have and will be using in this unit can be found here! :)

Here is the introduction Casey wrote for his report on lynx!

Here is the introduction Blake wrote for his report on deer!

Tomorrow, we will be following this same process for writing our conclusions to our animal reports.

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Our third quarter reading genre focus is BIOGRAPHY. Yesterday I introduced the genre to our kids. I also listed several characteristics of most biographies.

Prior to my lesson, I put post-its where I located all of the features and showed each example as we filled in the anchor chart of all the characteristics.

For guided practice, we handed out biography books to pairs of students. We asked them to page through their books to see if they, too, could locate all the characteristics of a biography.

Here's some footage of their biography characteristic hunt!

Students got a chance to share their discoveries. One of the discoveries was that it was a little difficult to locate the birth information. It didn't appear on the first page as students had thought! This student-initiated discovery became my mini-lesson for today. :) (I love it when that happens!)

Today we zoomed in on characteristic #5: Chronological order. I had specifically left a box on our anchor chart from yesterday so that I could address the unique structure of most biographies - the first chapter or introduction is written to HOOK US, then the next part of the book goes into the beginning of the person's life.

For guided practice today, students got another biography book and analyzed the first chapter/introduction to identify how it hooked them, followed by locating the birth information in the next chapter. Students used the sentence stems on the chart to formulate their response for when we shared. This study of introductions really went hand-in-hand with our lesson in Writer's Workshop on writing an introduction for our animal research! (Again, I love it when that works out!) To see the next lessons from our biography unit, click here!

We're Baaaack!

Ok, just because I've been gone from 'blogging land' doesn't mean we haven't been working hard in 4B. I've definitely been documenting a lot of what we've been doing!

To start, it was clear to me that our old way of peer conferencing just wasn't working. Kids seemed to be goofing around, not really helping each other, and it was a waste of everyone's time. It frustrated me when most of my one-on-one conference time was spent managing unruly PEER conferences. I knew something had to change. I decided to revamp our workshop so that our peer conferences would hold both the author and the peer more accountable AND work on our 6-traits language.

I introduced our 'new' method for peer conferencing using this anchor chart to document our process.

After students finish drafting, they are to grab a 6-traits peer conferencing sheet and assess themselves by circling all the descriptors for each trait that they feel match their own writing. Mind you, we did a lot of whole-class practice with scoring writing based on the 6-traits criteria so students would feel comfortable doing this process on their own (and being HONEST!). Through our mini-lessons we've learned that it's possible to have high scores in some traits but lower scores in others. That's how we grow! Here you see Devin circling where he thinks his writing falls on our 6-traits rubric. (Note: The link to the 6-traits peer conferencing sheet above will bring you to an even more updated version than the one shown in this blog posting! Just FYI!)

 Here's another student assessing her own writing after she's drafted.

 This student has finished assessing her writing using our rubric. She decides on a final number score and circles it to the left of the descriptors.

 Then it's time to meet with a peer. (We have a peer conference sign-up sheet in our room which helps students know which other students in the room are also ready to peer conference.) Here you see this author reading his story to his peer. After he's done reading, he will explain to his peer the scores he gave himself and why. It's important for the peer to listen carefully to the author because it will soon be her turn to assign a score to this author for each trait . On the lines on the rubric, she will write to explain the scores she gives him.

 The peer needs to follow the following sentence stems in his/her scoring response:
* I give this a writer a ___ because...
* This writer needs to work on ...
This process requires peers to truly work together, hold each other accountable, and it gets the kids using our 6-traits language a lot more. The second sentence stem helps the writer establish a goal for what to work on when revising! To see more of this peer conferencing process, watch a clip of us practicing this stage!

Our focus lately has been on the trait of organization. We've been looking thoroughly at different beginnings and endings of both student and published writing. Here is our anchor chart documenting what we noticed!

In other Writer's Workshop news, these are a few additional anchor charts we have in our room to help keep our writing organized.

 

 This anchor chart reminds us of powerful words to use to spice up 'said'!

 

In reading we have been working hard on purposeful talk.This is so very important to the social construction of knowledge in any classroom!

It's essential to teach students purposeful talk behaviors before even considering literature discussion groups (LDGs). The majority of kids talk like...well, KIDS! So, if we expect kids to talk like mature young people about different texts they read, we need to explicitly teach them how! Talking about Text by Maria Nichols is a great place to start if you're interesting in learning more about purposeful talk behaviors.

I taught each of the behaviors individually through two separate mini-lessons - one day to explain 'hearing all voices' in a concrete way (without text), and a second day to practice 'hearing all voices' using text. Then I taught 'saying something meaningful' in a concrete way without using text, and the next day we practiced 'saying something meaningful' using text , and so on. Eventually all of the purposeful talk behaviors kind of blended together and kids started to discover that we often need to use all of these things at the same time in order to truly talk purposefully about anything!

We did a lot of practicing, and I've been taping students in this process. Here is a clip of students practicing their behaviors while they talk about their families. (We had read a few books about different kinds of families to foster a safe environment to celebrate the fact that we all have different kinds of families!) We also had students practice their purposeful talk behaviors while discussing their best or worst memory in school (which helped warm up their brains for a timed writing activity we did during writer's workshop). Here is a clip! As a class, we watched these video clips to analyze our body language and other purposeful talk behaviors. I think taping and analyzing is a very effective way for students to learn how they should look and sound in an LDG.

 'Keeping the lines of thinking alive' is a tough concept for many youngsters. Sometimes what happens is that students take turns talking, but they don't really build on what the person before them said. In other words, they don't really DISCUSS, they just share and listen. We applauded the first group in this clip because they had good body language and were respectful as listeners, but we discovered their conversation needed to be more 'alive' by asking questions and making connections to each other's ideas and thoughts.

Mrs. Pierce and I taped ourselves doing a weak LDG and a strong LDG. As we watched each example, we used dots and lines to 'map out' our conversations (see chart below). In the weak LDG, we discovered Mrs. Pierce and I shared a lot of individual thoughts. The thought started, and then it stopped. There was really no discussion about anything we said; and Mrs. Pierce wasn't even looking at me during part of our time together! How rude! ;) In the strong LDG example, we mapped out a lot of dots and lines that were connected because we took each other's ideas and built on them. We truly discussed the text to dig deeper.

We introduced several conversational moves for students to use to help get their voice heard in a conversation. Students also have these conversational moves on a bookmark that they keep in their LDG books.

After we learned the respectful ways to speak and act when discussing with others, it was time to teach our kids how to flag their thinking. This is a crucial step to holding a successful literature discussion group because it allows the kids to track their important thoughts while reading so they have ideas for discussion the next day. Here are the 'codes' we use to track our thinking on post-its.

We encourage students to use one of our codes to categorize the kind of thought they have and then write a few words to trigger their thought. This helps them when they get into a discussion group; they'll actually have pinpointed ideas to discuss! Students kept a chart in their Thoughtful Logs with all of our codes on it for easy reference. Here's a clip of our students as they practice flagging their thinking for the first time. The next day, students put all their new learning to the test. We put them in small groups to discuss the text "Slower Than the Rest" which is a short realistic fiction story out of Cynthia Rylant's book Every Living Thing.

On another day, we used a high-interest two-page non-fiction text about leeches to continue practicing flagging our thoughts. Here's a clip of our kids flagging their thinking just after we modeled it during our mini-lesson. Below are some pictures of the kids' flagged thoughts.

In addition to purposeful talk, we've also been studying the historical fiction genre. We've read several mentor texts, including Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner and Dandelions by Eve Bunting.

Our first round of literature discussion books are all within the historical fiction genre. Here are a few of our historical fiction LDGs hard at work:
Dear Levi: Letters from the Overland Trail
Scraps of Time: Abby Takes a Stand
The River and the Trace (I think I put my finger over the microphone at minute 2:00!)

Oftentimes, historical fiction books will have a flashback in them. One group's book, called A Scrap of Time: Abby Takes a Stand by Patricia McKissick, has a flashback that occurs towards the beginning of the story. I photocopied some of the pages to try to explain this technique during a whole class mini-lesson. In the first section of the book, three grandkids are spending time with their grandma in her attic. They find an old menu and ask their grandma why she saved it. Chapters 1 through 12 flash back to 1960, where 'grandma' is just 10-years-old, living in Nashville, Tennessee at the time of a lot of civil rights protests. The menu is from a restaurant where a lot of sit-ins took place. Through the flashback a reader learns all about life during the 1960s. In the final section of the book, a reader finds him/herself back in the present - in grandma's attic, where the three grandkids ask their grandma some questions about her life during the sixties.

There was also another flashback in the story Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner.

We also read The Wreck of the Zephyr by Chris VanAllsburg as an example of a flashback in a fantasy book!

In other reading news, here is a picture of the anchor chart that stored all the non-fiction text features we've learned.

In social studies, we've been studying the economy of the five U.S. regions. Students have been reading small sections of non-fiction leveled readers to summarize a product or industry that is important to each region's economy. Students are typing up their summaries and we're calling those summaries 'articles' as they each create a magazine of our economy. Through this project, students have learned to:
* Summarize main ideas
* Center and left-justify their cursor
* Use the tab key to indent
* Change font size, color, and style
* Bold, underline, and italicize
* Safe image searches
* Copy and paste
* Cite their picture resources
Here is the inside of one student's magazine. Next week we will be using this site to create magazine covers!

Lastly, we had a chance to meet with our second-grade buddies earlier this month. We split the buddies up into two groups and one group stayed with Mrs. Adams to play holiday bingo.
 
 
 

The other group was with me in the computer lab. Buddies used this site to play a variety of math and English games. One of the most popular games to play was called 'Story Plant' where students could click on different leaves to create the beginning to a unique story. Depending on what leaves were clicked, you would get a different combination of characters, settings, problems, etc. The computer generates a beginning to a story that the kids can print off and finish during writer's workshop!

Have a wonderful weekend!