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!