Book Talks

Book Talk Day!!! Here is my story from today. A girl book talked ChickenHare. Then later in the day during reading time a student came up and asked if he could switch the book he was reading to ChickenHare. Of course! Later we were playing a quick game before we switched classes. While we played the game the student walked around the room playing the game and reading his new book. Kids do not dislike reading...they just have to find the right book.

Here are some of the props from today:

Here are some of the books that students shared:

And these were just a few of the amazing books that were shared today. I hope you got to hear about a few of these amazing books!

Reasons vs Evidence

One thing that I am really trying to get the students to understand this week is the difference between reasons and evidence. When someone is making a claim, that claim needs to be supported with evidence and reasons. Sometimes in our writing I will find evidence but no reasons or reasons but no evidence.

To show the students the difference we looked at a blog post I found where another writing teacher was explaining how she helps students and teachers understand the difference. I love the simplicity of her explanation. Reasons answer the question why and evidence answers the questions how and when.

The students then thought about some claims that we might have about Donovan. The claims the students came up with were great but in both classes we concentrated on the claim that all Donovan students should get iPads at school. The groups got together and started to think about reasons to support that claim. Each time they came up with a reason they had to make sure that it answered the question why. Finally the groups came up with evidence to support their evidence making sure that the evidence answered the question how or when.

Today in class to reinforce this we looked at what we call a smack-down claim from Time for Kids. In a smack-down claim there are two authors arguing a point, hence the name smack-down. This smack-down claim was about whether or not tropical fish should be sold in pet stores.

While the students looked at both sides of the argument, they put one color post-it note on the claim. Then using another color post-it note they found all the reasons. The last thing the groups had to do was look for evidence. Only one of the claims in the article had any evidence. The groups had one more discussion about which claim was better structured (not which claim they agreed with). All the groups were able to tell me the argument that had a claim, then some reasons, and supplied evidence was the better claim.

We are going to keep thinking about claims, reasons, and evidence. Right now the students are keeping a gigantic list of Arguments in the World. Some lists have grown to three pages long. All these ideas will help us as we get closer and closer to deciding our final claim.

Hope you are having a great week.

Claim Writing

We have started our last writing unit of the year. I cannot believe that is true but we are going to end the year with my favorite unit. This last unit could be called an argument unit or opinion unit or a claim unit. I think I love claim writing so much because you get to tell people what you think. Whenever I think of claims I always think about sports. Arguing whether or not Lebron is better than Jordan or if BP is more valuable than Votto is so much fun to me. Hopefully in the next few weeks I can get the class to find claim writing to be just as exciting.

Over the last few days we have been looking at some advertisements and thinking about the claims that they are making. Our first advertisement came from Bic and our second one came from Lego.

When we look at these ads, the students used the See...Say...Support... They first write what they see. We just are looking for the basic ideas. Students told me red legos, ballpoint pen, Bic logo, Lego logo, etc, etc. Then the students write down what the ad says or what is the claim of the ad. In both classes they really did an amazing job of figuring out the claim. Finally the students write down the support from the ad that helped them come up with the claim. Again the class did a great job.

Today instead of looking at claims I wanted the students to come up with some ideas of what they could write about for their final piece. To do this we had the students think about a few of their favorite things. Before they started to make their list, we listened to the song My Favorite Things. 

Then the class made a list of what they noticed about the song. They did a great job of finding different things they found in the song. One great thing they noticed was how the items that were favorites were descriptive. Now that we had looked at the song the students divided a page in two. On one side they wrote their favorites and on the other side things that made them sad.

After all this work the students went through the lists looking for arguments. They quickly realized that all the items could be turned into an argument. We picked one of the ideas and the students did some writing. I think we are off to a great start and I cannot wait to see more arguments tomorrow.

Hope your week is off to a great start.

Entrepreneurship

In Social Studies we have been talking about entrepreneurs. One of the concepts that we have been trying to understand is how an entrepreneur has the responsibility of organizing the human resources, natural resources and capital goods that are needed to make a product. In class we have watched two quick videos on how certain things are made. The first video was about how baseballs are made and the second showed us how sparklers are made. While the students watched the video, they wrote down the natural resources, capital good, and human resources they found.

Another idea that we have been trying to understand is the idea of profit and loss. When we have been thinking about these concepts, we have been thinking about lemonade stands.

The ideas of profit and loss connect back to this idea of gathering the human resources, capital goods, and natural resources to make a product. Hopefully the students can start to understand that when you first sell a cup of lemonade it does not mean you have made a profit. The lemonade stand will need to sell enough lemonade to cover the production costs.

You could reinforce these ideas at home by talking about what resources would go into making the products you buy out and about in town.

Hope you are having a great week and that the Reds can keep scoring 16 runs a game!!

The 13-Story Treehouse

Today we started our new read aloud!!

This book is a bit different from our other read aloud books. I really wanted a book that was going to be a light read. We have read some pretty serious books lately with Rain and Reign and All the Answers.

Do not get me wrong I loved the last two read aloud books, but I needed a book that was not going to make me cry. The 13-Story Treehouse fits that bill. It is just going to be plain old fun, and I do not think there is anything wrong with that kind of book.

Another reason that I wanted to read this book aloud was because summer is coming. I cannot believe it, but we have less than 30 days left. It is time to start thinking about what we are going to read this summer (I know that I cannot wait for Go Set a Watchman). The 13-Story Treehouse is a series. This summer if you are struggling to find some books to read you could grab The 26-Story Treehouse and The 39-Story Treehouse. 

Hope your week is off to a great start!

Another PTO Thank You

Today I was able to go shopping at the Book Fair that is going on this week at Donovan. The money I was spending was provided by the PTO. Here are just a few of the books I got (sorry about the pictures not being the best):

The Dork Diaries!! These books are so popular right now in the room. As soon as a new book comes out, someone will have it. I have a group that sits together in the room and they are all reading the Dork Diaries Series. These books are going to get a work out in my room.

STAR WARS STAR WARS STAR WARS STAR WARS!!! Do I need to say anything else. We have Jabba the Puppet and the one I am most excited about is Emperor Pickletine Rides the Bus. I cannot wait to steal that one and give it a quick read.

Geronimo Stilton is one of my favorite series and these are two new titles to add to our collection.

This is the book I am most excited about in the group. I have a feeling this is going to become as popular as The Diary of a Wimpy Kid. This book has two authors and looks to be hysterical.

Two nonfiction books and Doll Bones. 

An Andrew Clements book and The Cupcake Club.

A few graphic novels. I love that graphic novels seem to be becoming more and more popular. In the past few years it seemed hard to find a lot of different titles unless you were at a great book store. Now the trend is bringing a new graphic novel to each book order. These books are great at catching some of our more reluctant readers.

Another graphic novel and a poetry book.

I love adding new books to the library. In just a few days these books will make their way around the room. Hopefully my choices will be popular and more and more students will want to read them. When I told the class that I was adding some books to the library, I saw a student fist pump. Nothing is better that seeing students excited to go read new and different books. 

Thanks again to the PTO to bringing a little excitement and the chance to catch a few new life-long readers by giving me the chance to go book shopping. 

COSI on Wheels

Today we got a visit from COSI on Wheels. If you are not familiar with COSI, it is The Center of Science and Industry museum in Columbus. I love COSI and the COSI on Wheels is just as amazing. I am not sure but I think that for the last six or seven years COSI on Wheels has been visiting Donovan.

Today was one of the best visits. The topic of the day was ecosystems. In the morning we got to go down to the gym with the rest of the fourth grade and listen to a speaker from COSI.

The speaker did an amazing job of taking us on a journey through four different ecosystems. He showed us how some animals or seeds move through the ecosystems. It was quite interesting and we even got to see Mrs. Langdon play the role of a moth being eaten by a bat.

Then later in the day we went back to visit some learning stations. 

The stations were manned by volunteers. The volunteers did such an amazing job. Some of the volunteers were high school students. I was nothing but impressed. The high school students jumped right in and did an amazing job with our classes. I saw a lot of future elementary education majors. 

I thought our class did a great job visiting the sites and learning about the different ecosystems. The whole day the class did a great job of behaving for our visitors and learning. It was an awesome day.

Hope you are having a great week and that the Reds have more than a two run lead in the eighth. 

Article of the Week

One of my favorite things about starting a new week is our Article of the Week. The Article of the Week is just like it sounds...we read a current event article. This year we have read articles about a buddy bench, the drought in California, baseball in the Dominican, veterans of Pearl Harbor, starfish in the Pacific, whales, sledding bans, and the list goes on and on.

Today we read an article about a volleyball player and her family who were suing her club team because of lack of playing time. It was a fun article that really made me think about whether or not the girl had a right to sue her team. Her parents had paid to play on the team and were promised playing time. When that playing time was not given, the family was unhappy.

One of the reason I love the Article of the Week is it allows the class to keep up to date with topics that are going on in the world around them. This year we will read 30 plus articles about a variety of topics. These articles just build the background knowledge of the class. In the future they might be able to use this background knowledge when reading other articles or having discussions or in other classes.

The other reason that I love the Article of the Week is it allows us to revisit some reading strategies or thinking skills that students can use when they read. Today we revisited the idea of Synthesizing Spirals. Synthesizing is one of our reading strategies that I probably talk about the most. The idea of synthesizing is that a reader most change their thinking as they read. The reader will change her mind based on what is occurring in the text. To reinforce this idea of synthesizing I marked four places in today's article where we would stop and write about our thinking. Each spot was marked with a spiral. The spirals that I marked in the article got larger as we went along in the article to remind the students that their thinking should be growing and changing as they read.

The students used some of our synthesizing thinking stems as we read the article and filled out our Synthesizing Spirals:

• My new thinking is...
• I'm beginning to think...
• Now I understand why...
• I'm changing my mind about...
• I used to think ________ but now I think...

These thinking stems really allow the students to show their thinking. If you are reading or even watching a movie at home, you can practice this strategy. If you are looking for some of your own articles to read at home my two favorite sites are Newsela and TweenTribune. Both sites are amazing because they allow you to adjust the reading level to fit what you need.

Hope your week is off to a great start and I hope the Reds can find someone to pitch the eighth inning UGHHHHHH! 

We Are Back

I know it has been a long time since I checked in so I thought I would do a quick run down.

We are continuing to read All the Answers by Kate Messner.

I really am enjoying the questions that we are having to ask ourselves as we read this book. The fact that Ava has a magic pencil that can give you the answers has made us think about some difficult questions. I think one of my favorite questions that we have been thinking about is if it is cheating to use a magic pencil to help you with your homework or a test. I love how some of the students have started to see the pencil as a kind of Siri. You ask it questions and it can give you an answer. These students think that using the pencil to do your homework is no big deal it is the same as someone using the internet. I loved that idea. We have also been thinking about the questions that we would ask the pencil if we had a chance. I hope you are hearing about this book at home. If you are not, ask some questions about this magic pencil.

In reading today we started to think about heroes. For the next few weeks we are going to think about heroes. We are going to look at some fictional heroes and some everyday heroes. To start our thinking we worked on an 11 minute essay. An 11 minute essay is exactly like what it sounds like. The students write for 11 minutes. Today I had the students think about four different questions. In the first paragraph the students wrote for 3 minutes in response to a quote from Christopher Reeve. The next paragraph the students had to write for two minutes about what they thought was the most important trait of a hero. In the third paragraph the class wrote for three minutes about the difference between fictional heroes and real heroes. Finally in the last paragraph the students wrote for three minutes about their hero.

The thinking that the students shared was amazing. Students talked about how real heroes did not cheat with superpowers. How real heroes did not need a cape or a mask to help others. They talked about their mom or dad and how they were their heroes. It was some really high quality writing. Three weeks from now I am going to ask them to write this same essay. The only thing that will be different the second time is the students will need to use examples from the texts we are going to read to support their thinking. I cannot wait to read those pieces.

In writing the students are working on their final drafts of their poems. I have been running around the room having conferences with students who are finishing up these amazing pieces. To help students with these final drafts we did another quick lesson on line breaks. We talked about two pieces of advice that Ralph Fletcher gave to help find good places to add line breaks to our work. The students then practiced the tips on the Langston Hughes poem April Rain Song.

Again I am so sorry that it has been a long time since I have checked in on the blog. Hopefully now that we are back more on our regular schedule I can keep up. 

Hope you are having a great week and enjoying the warm weather!!

Quotes

Lately I have been obsessed with quotes. I am not sure why. In the last few books I have been reading on my own there has been quotes weaved into the story. I think this started my obsession. It is not helping is that in our new read aloud All the Answers the main character Ava is collecting quotes.

We are only a few chapters in and already there have been five or six amazing quotes. One of the quotes that I keep kicking back and forth in my brain comes from Einstein--"Any fool can know. The point is to understand."

I love how this quote fits with the book. The main character Ava has a magic pencil that can give her all the answers, but Ava seems unsure about using it. Ava thinks that using the pencil might be cheating. I also think that Ava believes that using the pencil will not make help her know things it will just give her the answers. 

More and more I have been kicking around what Einstein's quote means to me as an educator. One of the projects on our menu board is to have students memorize a section of the Declaration of Independence. It is amazing to see some of our students memorize the portion of the Declaration and be able to recite it in front of the class. The words just flow and fill the room. The part of the Declaration they are memorizing is not short:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

I know I could not have memorized this when I was in fourth grade. 

This week we have been diving into this section of the Declaration. Trying to figure out not just what it says but what it means. Each day we look at the section I come back to Einstein's quote, "Any fool can know. The point is to understand." It is amazing that these students can recite this section but I believe it is more important for them to understand. These words hold such an important place in our country. "Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" is the blueprint for democracy. I want our students to understand the power of these words. 

I always want our students to understand not just know. That is not to say that knowing is not important. 

I am constantly amazed at what our students and teachers are doing in math. I will be honest math is not in my wheelhouse. Each week when I walk in Mrs. Sanford's room or see my wife's lesson plans or peak into rooms around the school, I am in awe of what these math teachers and students do. 

I love to go back to Einstein's quote when I think about what our students are doing in math. "Any fool can know. The point is to understand." More and more our students are being asked to explain their thinking. Do they really understand or do they just know? I think we see this the most in math. Our students seem to write just as much as they do in math class as they do with me in writing. 

Maybe the point of all that thinking is to make sure that the students understand. Sure it is of vital importance to know the times tables and certain rules but maybe like Einstein says it is just as important to understand those rules and time tables.

Hope you are having a great week.

Book Talk Day

Nothing beats a book talk day!

I found a tweet last weekend on Twitter. Twitter is an amazing place for educators. You can follow authors, teachers, principals, reading experts and so many others who are just interested in education. I cannot find the tweet as I write tonight but the gist of the tweet was...nothing beats a book recommended by another student. I could not agree more. I can talk about amazing books, but if a student tells another student that a book is good that book will make its way around the classroom quicker than the common cold. This is why I love book talk day. The students are going to do all the work for me. They are going to share books they love and tomorrow when it is time to read they should all have books to read.

Here are some of the books that were shared today in class:

This is just a tiny example of all the amazing books that I got to hear about today.

I hope you are all having a great week. How about those Dayton Flyers!! 16-0 at home this year. The class knows I will be in a good mood tomorrow!!

Reviews

For the next few days we are going to work on writing book reviews. As soon as we finish these book reviews we are going to get back to the poems. I have been working on making comments on the poems and the students will get them back this Wednesday. So far the poems are amazing!

I love reviews. I eat at a lot of restaurants and nothing beats getting a good review from my brother before I head out. One of my favorite things to read is music reviews and book reviews. This week I wanted to share that joy my joy of reviews with the students.

Today in class we looked at six different book reviews. The class visited the six different reviews in groups thinking about what they noticed. We had a book review for Half a Chance and Absolutely Almost.

We also looked at some book reviews for some books that we had not read. As the students toured the book reviews, they took notes. The class had a T-Chart that allowed them to keep track of what all the book reviews had and what some of the book reviews included that they loved. 

The class made an amazing list of what they found. They noticed that book reviews included:

• titles
• authors
• brief summaries
• a challenge
• a favorite part
• a quote from the book
• a challenge at the end
• a question lead
• a sound lead
• and on and on and on

I am always impressed when I just ask the students to tell me what they notice. We are going to take these observations and use them to help us create our own book reviews. Over and over I tried to get the students to understand that we were doing the work of real authors. 

Real authors always read and notice examples of what they are going to write. I think this is more obvious to the students in these quick writing units. In our poetry unit we looked at tons of poetry. I think the students do not always realize how much that poetry is affecting their writing. Believe me though when I make their comments this week I can see the influence that poetry had on their work. Hopefully this quick writing unit will hammer home that idea that if you want to create a piece of writing one of the first steps is to find exemplar examples of that type of writing. Then use those examples to help you create your piece. 

I hope your week is off to a great start and if you want to leave me any restaurant reviews please feel free. 

This week we have really been working on reviewing some ideas that we have been talking about all year long. On Tuesday we had a giant sort race. The students were given a whole page of different notecards. They had to take the notecards and think of a way to sort them into columns. I was amazed at how the students quickly were able to sort the ideas into columns.

Today we worked on reviewing some nonfiction text features. To review these text features we had the students go on a scavenger hunt. The students had to search through some old Time for Kids.

The groups worked together to find:

• Titles
• Subtitles
• Headings
• Pictures and Captions
• Diagrams
• Charts
• Word Banks
• Bold Words/Highlighted Words/Italicized Words
• Maps

The floor was soon covered in tiny pieces of the magazines. As each text feature was found, the groups would glue it down on a sheet of paper. When the scavenger hunt was over, we talked about how authors use these text features in their writing.

In our new read aloud All the Answers we are getting to know our main character Ava. 

Today in the book Ava was upset to find her sanctuary, the school library, was holding a club meeting. Ava stuck around not wanting to leave and then got drawn into the meeting. The club was called the Chocolate Chip Cookie Club but really it was a group talking and thinking about poetry. The club was discussing similes and metaphors. The group moaned about the topic but then Mrs. Galvin shared a poem where the author was making fun of the overuse of metaphors by some authors. The poem is Billy Collins "Litany". Then with the last few minutes the club talks about Robert Frost's "The Secret Sits". I hope the book continues to discuss poetry. It will be the perfect ending to our poetry unit.

I hope you are having a great week.

Impressed

I want to say how impressed I was with both classes today. We had a long Winter Break part Deux. I thought the students would ease back into the day. I was wrong. They came in and put the pedal to the floor.

The big news of the day was a new read aloud. This was the worst part of my Winter Break part Deux. I had picked out our new book over the long weekend. I was so excited to start. Each day when another snow day was announced I knew I had to wait one more day to start. A few times I almost cracked the book and started to read. I have already talked on the blog about how I love to read the book with the students. Even with all the temptation I was able to hold off and wait to start the book today.

Our next read aloud is going to be All the Answers by Kate Messner.

This book is brand spanking new. The release date was January 27, 2015. I was going to read some of the other books that had been contenders for the 2014 Newbery but I felt like we might as well start working on books that could win in 2015. When I got the book at the book store, the cashier lit up when she saw the title. She told me how she had just finished the book and loved it. She thought it was going to be a perfect read aloud. Nothing like a glowing book recommendation in the check out aisle.

With our surprise Winter Break there has been some changes to the schedule. The first change was the assessments the students were supposed to start today. The students will now be taking their language arts assessments February 25-27. Then they will have their math assessments March 4th and 5th. With these changes I decided to move some of our project dates. We will now be having our book talks on March 3rd and our Revolutionary War Menu Boards will be due March 6th. I sent home a half page explaining these changes in the assignment book. Let me know if you have any questions.

Hope your week is off to a great start.

One Of Those Days

I had such a fun day today. I wanted to do something so the students could think just a bit more about Rain Reign.

I decided that we would have a silent conversation. We have done these conversations a few times before and I think I have even talked about them on the blog. The idea of a silent conversation is that the students talk with each other but the whole conversation takes place on a piece of paper. Each student in a group of four or five will start a conversation. This is the main reason that I love this exercise. I do not tell the students what they need to discuss (besides letting them know they are going to talk about Rain Reign) instead the students decide what is important to them. Then each paper makes it away around the group. As the papers travel around the circle, the students add their thinking.

Another aspect of the silent conversation that I love is that the students are more willing to disagree with each other. I have been looking at some of the conversations tonight. You can find these moments when students will say things like, "I like what ____________ said but I have to disagree." Then they will go and explain why they disagree. I think this is an amazing statement. The students are learning that they can disagree with each other but they can disagree in respectful ways. They also love to support what their fellow classmates have to say. On almost every silent conversation you can find someone "saying", "I love what ____________ said because" and then they go on to support their thinking.

Not only do you see this amazing amount of respect on the page, but you can also see some beautiful thinking. The conversations show how smart, caring, and thoughtful the students are that I get to work with each day. We are not done with Rain Reign just yet. Next week as we take a break from working on our poems we are going to take the time to write a book review. I know for sure that my book review is going to be glowing.

Then I wanted to spend some time reviewing for our poetry assessment on Friday. I took all the different pieces of advice that we have taken from Ralph Fletcher about how to make our poems musical, emotional, and image filled and placed them in boxes on a piece of paper.

I passed out the papers to the class. When we were all ready, the students flipped over the paper, cut out the cards, and raced to organize them in correct piles. I love moments of competition in the room. The room will get loud but it is loud in a special way. The students will be screaming, "this one goes in music!" or "this one goes in emotion!"

This would be a great way to study for our assessment this Friday. I sent these same notecards home in the writing folder. You could get out a timer and test how fast the students could organize them into correct piles. If you are not sure of the answers, check the study guide that should also be in the writing folder.

After our races, the students got to work on their first drafts. The room was filled with action. Students were finishing their drafts and filling out a reflection sheet for each of their poems. I love reading their poetry and they are all producing some great drafts. I cannot wait to get them this weekend and start to give them suggestions for those final drafts.

I hope you are having a great week.

The End

Today we finished Rain Reign.

I had been waiting and waiting to see how this book would end. Today did not disappoint. I hope that you have been hearing about this book at home. I think it is such an important story and hopefully the class loved it as much as I did.

In honor of Rain Reign here are my top five favorite read aloud books:

Number 5-How to Steal a Dog

Number 4 The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Number 3 Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

Number 2 Rain Reign

Number 1 The One and Only Ivan