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

Some Art

Friday was a great day. It seemed like we got to look at art all day long. It started in reading where we have been talking about Paul Revere's life. We decided to look at how two artists had portrayed Revere in their work.

The first painting is from Grant Wood and the second painting is from John Singleton Copley. As we looked at the art, the class took notes on what they saw, what they noticed, and what they wondered. I am always amazed at what the students can find when we look at art. Each year a student finds something new that I had not seen or thought of before.

After the students finished seeing, noticing, and wondering, they got in groups and filled out a Venn Diagram comparing the two paintings. The differences were easy but the class was able to come up with many interesting things the paintings had in common. 

Today in class we added another piece of artwork on Paul Revere when we looked at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere." We talked about how Longfellow released the poem in 1861 years after the famous ride. The students looked through the poem looking for things that we knew from the historical tellings we had looked at of the midnight ride. Tomorrow we will go more in depth and look at what the poem and the history have in common and what is different.

In poetry we continued to read Ralph Fletcher's amazing book Poetry Matters. 

The class has been working hard to craft their poems in their writer's notebooks. The last bit of advice that Fletcher gave about crafting dealt with Line Breaks and Stanzas. I told the class that this is a struggle for me in my writing but Fletcher gave some great advice to help us all. My favorite piece of advice was to read the poem aloud. When our voices stopped, we should start a new line. To work on this crucial skill we looked at some Beatles lyrics. I showed the class how I might take the lyrics from "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" and add line breaks and stanza breaks. I read the poem aloud and even played the song for the class. We added single slash marks for a line break and a double slash mark for a new stanza. Then the class got into groups and worked on the same idea with the song "Blackbird". Finally they went into their writer's notebooks and took some time to look and think about line breaks in their poems. 

This work will hopefully help this week as the students are picking their three favorite poems to turn into projects. I already saw some students today continuing to use the slash strategy before they wrote their first draft.  

I hope your week is off to a great start.

Rain Reign

If you have not heard, Rain Reign did not win the Newbery. The book did walk away with many awards just not the Newbery. I have to admit I was a bit disappointed but that does not dampen my enthusiasm for this amazing story. 

The reason that I love this book so much is Rose. She is an amazing character. Each day I find myself rooting for her. In the last few days she has become one of my all-time favorites. 

Today I asked the students to stop and think back about everything we had read so far in Rain Reign. The class broke down into groups and worked on a 3-in-3. I love this little strategy. It forces the students to think about something quickly and often the results show what they have learned. As usual the 3 word phrases the students created were perfect. After sharing some of our favorites, the students went off on their own and wrote about their most important 3 word phrase. I handed out gigantic notecards. They wrote the phrase on the blank side and then on the side with lines they explained their phrase. The thinking was evident from the few that I have had a chance to read. 

Just in case you wondering the books that won the Newbery Honor were:

I adore these two books. In fact Brown Girl Dreaming was the book that I thought for sure would win the medal. El Deafo has become a popular book in our room. I think one thing that has helped with its popularity is the fact that it is a graphic novel. Brown Girl Dreaming is a book that I am thinking about reading aloud this year. It is simply beautiful. The book is written in prose form. 

And the winner was:

I have ordered the book and plan to read it as soon as I can but after reading a few reviews I decided it is not the right book for read aloud. Many reviews put the book in the 6th-10th grade range. Hopefully when the students are older they can find this book and decided if it deserved the medal over some of the books we read this year.

I hope you are all having a great week.

Languid Wrenches

I know I talked about poetry but I wanted to talk about the next chapter we are reading in Poetry Matters.

The new chapter starts with this amazing quote from XJ Kennedy, "The World is full of poets with languid wrenches who don't bother to take the last six turns on their bolts." I love this idea. Right now our writer's notebooks are filled with some amazing poems. Now it is time to get to work on those poems. We have to work to make what is all ready good and make it the best it can be. This is hard work. Just like those last six turns on a bolt can be difficult. Although the work is difficult those last six turn are essential. 

The reason that I love this chapter about "crafting our poems" so much is because Fletcher gives such amazing advice. He makes the hard seem so simple. Today his advice was to "think fragments." He talked about how teachers can drill the idea of complete sentences into students heads, but sometimes a poem needs a fragment or a group of fragments. To prove the point we read the poem Subways are People by Lee Bennett Hopkins. 

SUBWAYS ARE PEOPLE
By Lee Bennett Hopkins

Subways are people-

People standing
People sitting
People swaying to and fro
Some in suits
Some in tatters
People I will never know.

Subways are people-

Some with glasses
Some without
Boy with smile
Girl with Frown

People dashing
Steel flashing
Up and down and round the town.

Subways are people-

People old
People new
People always on the go
Racing, running, rushing people
People I will never know.

After the class had read the poem, we sent them back to write. I put a picture up of New York City at night. 

The class wrote and filled their poems with fragments. Then we stopped and we went to work on one of our favorite poems. The class tried to find spots that they might use fragments to make this good poem even better. 

When we read this chapter, I always see the students work improve. They take these "simple" ideas from Fletcher and put them to work in their poetry.

I hope you are having a great week.

Poetry Check-In

I got a bit off track last week on the blog. Hopefully this week I can get back to a full week of posts.

Today I wanted to let you know what we have been talking about in poetry. We are still making our way through Ralph Fletcher's book Poetry Matters.

In the book Fletcher talks about the three pillars of poetry: emotion, image, and music. Each pillar is given its own chapter. In the chapters Fletcher gives advice on how to make the students poetry shine. Here are the four pieces of advice that we have learned so far:

Emotion

1. Think of the poem as an emotional X-Ray
2. Don't say too much
3. Convey emotions through images
4. Try poem speak

Image

1. Use the five senses
2. Try similes and metaphors
3. Personification
4. Use symbols

Music

1. Play with words
2. Use alliteration
3. Fine tune the rhythm
4. Repetition for Emphasis

This weekend I got to read through the writer's notebooks. It is always so much fun to read all the different types of poetry that the students are producing. My favorite part is finding evidence of the students trying these tips they are learning from Ralph Fletcher. I cannot wait to see the poems that the students decide to pick to publish later this week.

I hope your week is off to a great start.