Island of the Blue Dolphins

Our new essential question is: How can reading literature help us to understand a culture? I picked Island of the Blue Dolphins because evidence of Karena's Indian culture is prevalent throughout the novel.

On this poster you can see that we are adding evidence from the novel of various customs/beliefs of the island people.

One writing assignment we worked on had to do with choices the main character has to make. Karena's brother does not make it to the ship that has come to rescue the native people. Karena has an important choice to make. Should she stay on the boat with her sister or jump off to stay with her young brother? Here is the worksheet we used for discussion surrounding this suspenseful part of the story.

Another writing assignment we worked on had to do with the fact that the author, Scott O'Dell, does not let us know how Karena is feeling about many of the events in her life. The novel is told from Karena's point of view but we rarely get a clear idea of how she is doing emotionally. We had to do some close reading of the text in order to infer this character's feelings. The last few pictures showed how we analyzed the text and made our thinking visible in the margins  as we read. Christine

Common Core in the Classroom: Cricket Investigation

Bud, Not Buddy projects

One of our writing assignments for the story Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis was this: How is the suitcase a symbol in the story? What does it stand for? What does he keep in it?I cut paper bags to make "suitcases" for the writing/project. The students decorated the outside. On the inside of the suitcase the students had to put pictures,items or drawings that actually represented the things that were most important to Bud.

You can see his rocks and the blue flyers here. We also had fun typing the writing assignment and creating a wordle of Bud's character traits.

Class Dojo

My teaching partner started using Class Dojo with the 4th and fifth graders this year. It is an online behavior management program that teachers can use for free! http://www.classdojo.com/Students earn and get dojo points taken away for a variety of reasons. The teacher can choose what they want the class to work on: On task behaviors, persistence, working together and so on. I partnered this program with another one calledfitnessfinders.net This company had awards or charms in increments of 25. Once one of our students earns 25 dojo points they get a necklace, a dog tag, and a 25 "dojo" charm.

Our Dojo necklaces!

This company gives out lots of free samples of many different charms. The possibilities are endless! Christine

ELA Notebooking

Interactive notebooking is really interesting. I learned about it from some different blogs: The Middle School Mouth and A Teacher's Treasure. Here is my Pinterest board with links to the various sites: http://pinterest.com/cjken42/ela-notebooks/ 

The first page of the fiction section  is a reading log

The inside cover of the 4th grade notebook looks like this. You can see the poster that we used as inspiration. Our essential question was: Why do authors write stories?

On another page (this is is the fifth grade notebook) we log in the conflict of the various stories we read. You can see that we make it interactive by placing a picture of the  story on the conflict poster, This stays up all year.

Here is another page in the 5th grade notebook that is also interactive. We log the point of view of each story in our notebooks and on the poster.

I have started to add foldables to our ELA notebooks. Here is one on similes. This is fun but it is also a work on progress. I originally put three tabs in the notebooks: fiction, nonfiction and language. I wasn't sure where I wanted to put similes. It ended up in language. My long term plan is that the students use the notebooks as a resource. We have glued in other pages like these one that lists sample character traits. Whenever they need a trait they could look at this page. Christine

Essential questions

Why is freedom so important to us? It's a great essential question that fit in really well with Harriet Tubman week. I wrote about Harriet Tubman week  here: http://christine-readingisthinking.blogspot.com/2010_07_01_archive.html 

What I really loved was that the essential question allowed us to tie together books that are completely different: Biographies, historical fiction stories and science fiction. When you study Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth it is really easy to see how their lives connect to our essential question. I decided to read the novel Among The Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix at the same time.

It is a science fiction (dystopian) novel about a society when having a third child is illegal. Luke, the main character, has to spend his life hiding in the attic from the Population Police. This novel really makes kids think about the concept of freedom in a new way. Its also part of a series, so if I can get them hooked on the first story we have 6 more books ahead! Christine

Point of View

The new Common Core standards are quite challenging when it comes to teaching point of view. I haven't had to teach the difference between first and third person point of view to fourth and fifth graders before. After reading a story and determining its point of view together, we have been adding it to this poster in our room.

These are books the 5th graders have read so far

We've also started ELA notebooking and I'm finding that very exciting. I will take some pictures of our notebooks and put together a post about that. One page in our notebook matches the point of view poster above. Christine