Learning about the Titanic

The 100 year anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic is tomorrow. Scholastic had the first book of the I Survived..... series on sale for $1.00 a piece! What a great book! Both the 4th and 5th graders thoroughly enjoyed reading it.We started learning about the Titanic with an article in Weekly Reader. The more I use Weekly Reader the more impressed I've become. I'm always looking for nonfiction sources with great text features. This month WR had an awesome map/timeline of the sinking of the Titanic. I also found some great Youtube videos about the Titanic to use in class. After we finished I Survived The Sinking of  The Titanic we had to write a two word summary. Here is a picture of the poster we made together.

Some children chose words that described George, the main character, others chose words  to describe the feelings they had while reading the book. A few children felt an object from the story or a theme was most important. Coming up with only two words to describe a whole book can be challenging!

We also spent some time reading about the Costa Concordia that sank off the coast of Italy in January in an old WR edition.. The article gave us lots of room for comparison to the Titanic. It also had another great map to help us visualize what exactly happened to that ship.
If your students are very interested in the Titanic and you are looking for even more resources,
http://www.wegivebooks.org/books has the book Titanic Sinks! available to read online for free.  Christine

An introduction to Anne Frank

After reading Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, I like to introduce my 5th graders to Anne Frank. David Adler's picture book biographies are excellent. The one he wrote about Anne is particularly wonderful. It is a beautiful introduction to a difficult but important story that fifth graders a ready to learn a little bit about. I explain that most middle school/high school students are expected to read The Diary of Anne Frank as a class assignment. This is just an introduction.

   The lesson goes as follows: I ask the students to fold a piece of paper into a mini "file". (This represents the file cabinet we have in our heads, our background knowledge.) On the front we make our thinking visible by writing everything we know about Anne Frank. Some students have never heard of her before, their file cabinets are empty and we are about to fill them up. Inside we write all of the questions we have about her BEFORE reading. Then we partner read the David Adler picture book, I have a class set. Next, we write all of the questions we have AFTER reading the book. On the back of the file folder we write a summary of the story. A class discussion follows regarding the questions that came up as they read. I have a collection of books written for elementary age students that I share with them after this experience. Christine 

Summarizing for the 21st century

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Summarizing for the 21st century

View more presentations from Emily Kissner.

more on summarizing

This is my poster for summarizing the story How To Babysit an Orangutan in the 4th grade Trophies book. You can see that it is interactive.We build the summary together during class. (I used velcro after laminating the strips to attach them to the poster. ) All of these posters are hung on top of each other for easy storage. You can see the red hooks at the top of the picture. I tried to take the focus skill from each story and make an interactive poster for teaching the lesson. I got many of my ideas for the posters right out of the teaching manual. Although it was a lot of work at the beginning, I have used them for many years now and they are so easy.Christine

Trophies lessons

Lou Gehrig: The Luckiest Man By David Adler is in the 4th grade Trophies anthology. I like this lesson to teach summarizing. I have the kids do a timeline of Lou's life using the dates in the story. You can see from the poster that we picked eleven important dates and put them in the order in which they happened (using a sticker for each one.) Next they write the events in paragraph form. It is important to talk about what is missing. I ask them, "Can you think of any other IMPORTANT details that would need to be in the summary that were not on the timeline?" I have them search out three or four other important details and write them on stickies. (determining importance reading strategy). Christine