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