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!

 

Animal Research - Parts 11 & 12, Learning Fair, Biographies, & Determining Importance (PHEW!)

In our last blog posting (Part 10), students wrote the introduction to their animal reports. Today, we talked about writing a satisfying conclusion. I used the slide below to identify that a conclusion appears at the end of a piece of writing!

We analyzed the conclusions of several published authors. This is the conclusion from a book about tigers. We noticed that the author made us feel like we were right in the environment/habitat of the tiger!

In this conclusion from a book on pelicans, we discussed how the author briefly reviewed some of the surprising information she didn't want us to forget from her book. She also invited us to learn even more about pelicans!

This conclusion from a book on owls also put us right in the environment of an owl and told us what to do if we spotted one!

I made a template to help students combine all these wonderful characteristics of good conclusions. I wrote my own conclusion for my report on owls and left an open template for students to fill in their own. (Please note, the word 'jungle' in the first line of the slide below should say 'forest'! Mistakes happen, right?)

 Here is a conclusion one student wrote for his report on pandas.

Here's another student's conclusion to his report on crocodiles:

The past two days in writing, we've been peer conferencing. Students took their introduction, their habitat paragraph, their diet paragraph, their defense mechanisms paragraph, and their conclusion and stapled it together to make one complete draft of their animal report. I partnered students up, and they worked together to do a "5-4-3-2-1" peer conference. Students were to help each other add 5 descriptive adjectives, 4 lively verbs, 3 sound effects, 2 similes, and put tallies down (we call these the 1's) for any capitals or punctuation that needed to be added.

Click here to see how I structured the publishing stage of the writing process for our animal research! Visit my TpT site if you're interested in getting all the student sheets used in this animal research unit.

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In different news, every spring our P.T.O. helps students meet at lunch time a few days a week to explore any topic of their choice to present on a poster at the Learning Fair. The Learning Fair is optional but an awesome opportunity for students to go above and beyond! Here were the kids from our room who participated:

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In reading last Thursday, we discussed the difference between narration and dialogue. Authors of biographies use both kinds of text, but they typically use narration more, with just a few sentences of dialogue here and there to help the book come alive. Direct quotes are a great way to show you've done your research and have talked to real people from the person's life! I highlighted in orange for all the narration on one page of our mentor text and explained that narration should be read with a normal, natural voice. I used pink to highlight the dialogue sentences and the quotation marks and explained that dialogue should be read with a little more expression, since it's a direct quote from someone else!

For guided practice, I copied a different page from our mentor text that had narration with some scattered dialogue and had students color-code to show they understood the difference. They also practiced reading the narration and dialogue fluently using the two different types of voices we talked about.

In reading last Friday, we discussed how you can gain a lot of information about a person's time period and culture from reading a biography book. I used a page from a book about Franklin D. Roosevelt to model my thinking. I highlighted parts of the text that revealed information about the time period and culture in which F.D.R. lived. (My thoughts are in pink...)

For guided practice, I handed out a different page from the F.D.R. mentor text. Students read the page and they shared out on what they had learned about the 1930's. (Students' thoughts are in orange writing on the anchor chart above.) They were shocked that kids had to work back in the 1930's - barefoot! - and that sometimes people married their cousins. Students wondered if that was legal back then, and if that's even legal now.

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In reading today, we switched gears into talking about our Quarter 3 reading comprehension strategy focus - DETERMINING IMPORTANCE. To demonstrate this strategy, I used two plastic containers, noodles, water, and a strainer. (P.S. - This is a lesson idea I got from Comprehension Connections by Tanny McGregor. Awesome book! You must get it!)

I explained that determining importance is a lot like straining noodles. The container with water and noodles is like a book you pick up off the shelf. Inside the book is all sorts of information - some is very important information (like the noodles), while other information isn't as important (like the water), but that you need all of it to make the book what it is.

As you start reading a book and after you've finished it, it's your brain's job (strainer) to determine what's important (noodles) and what's not (water). Your brain should hold on to the important information, key topics, and main ideas, and let the rest pass through, just like when we strain noodles!

We anchored our learning on this chart. (After all, real noodles only stay fresh for so long!)

Students did a response to explain what they understood about our noodle metaphor for determining importance.

During independent reading, students were to think about the 'noodles' and the 'water' of the books they were reading to see if they could find what was important versus unimportant about their books.

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!