My Side of the Mountain

We have been using My Side of the Mountain as a mentor text for our WEX writing assignments. In this lesson the students needed to find text based evidence of Sam's character traits.

Those super large stickers came from http://www.exclrecycles.org/donate.html
Each teacher in our school got a free one year membership to Extras For Creative Learning from the EDIC. Its a store filled with all kinds of misc. school supplies and materials for art projects. I got piles of those stickers and thought long and hard about how to use them. Each group completed one sticker by adding a character trait and the text based evidence from various parts of the novel. Then  we posted them on our anchor chart. If you can think of any other great ways to use all those stickers, let me know!

Our next lesson involved producing a timeline for the book. Chapter one is confusing for the reader because it takes place in the middle of the story. The journal actually begins in chapter 2. The timeline helped the students to determine importance. They could only list 10 events. This caused much discussion over which events where the most important and why.Christine

Vocabulary ideas

I used this idea from Words, Words, Words, as a way to review our vocabulary words ,
may of which were character traits from Trophies, Theme 1, grade 4. I give it as a HW assignment. The children
love putting the stickers on!

I made sets of these Greek and Latin root cards for my 5th graders to use.

I just finished Learning Words Inside and Out by Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher. Its filled with lots of simple ways to incorporate vocabulary into everyday lessons. It inspired me to reread Janet Allen's Words, Words, Words which is another great resource if you are trying to improve your vocabulary instruction. I gathered together some pictures of vocabulary ideas I've used in the classroom which were inspired by these two books:

After studying the Greek and Latin root cards with a partner, students use these posters to
make their new learning visible.

Using roots to relate words to each other is a great strategy to practice with kids.
This poster was made for the story Blue Willow, from our grade 4 Trophies.

I love this strategy for relating words to each other.

Studying Helen Keller

We've been reading Scholastic chapter book biographies for homework (Rosa Parks and Neil Armstrong) but in class we are enjoying Helen Keller by Margaret Davidson

 I have a class set so every child has a copy. The text is easy reading (third grade level) but my focus has been inferring both Annie and Helen's personality traits through actions, dialogue or monologue. To introduce the skill I refer to them as thoughts, actions, or words.This is the first time I have done this with my fourth graders and I thought they got the hang of it pretty quickly. We listed the trait, how it was revealed to us in the story, and the text based evidence with pg. number.

                      This is the anchor chart we developed for Annie, or Teacher, as she was fondly known

Several of my 4th graders have really become interested in learning more about Helen Keller. The following website for kids gives lots of info and pictures of Helen throughout her life:
http://www.afb.org/braillebug/hkgallery.asp?tpid=1
Its great for showing on the Smartboard. Christine

Uprising: Character Traits

Wordle about character traits 

 We have done some work on inferring character traits while reading Uprising. I love the idea several of my 5th graders came up with: Highlight the traits that refer to each character in the Wordle. I took a picture of the "key" they made. The worksheet I used with this activity has the students find text based evidence of the character trait. They had to find actions, thoughts( monologue) or words (dialogue) that showed the trait. I did the top one for them (I gave them a page for each of the three characters in the story). Christine

key my students came up with

Character traits

While reading Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott Odell we did some work on Karena's character traits. I made a Wordle of character traits that I thought applied to Karena during various chapters of the story. The assignment was to list the trait and the text based evidence.

http://www.wordle.net/Here is a Smartboard lesson I used after reading the story. Was Karena a real person?

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B7F2yr3X_5kzMjBiYTk5YjAtZWY5NC00ODQyLTg3NjktMzg4MmRjMjI1YWMw&hl=en

Christine