Connections Help Visualizations/ Visualization Game/ Memoir Partner Editing

It is the end of the quarter, so it has been a busy week in the classroom. We are wrapping up our month on focusing on Visualization. Students have loved this hands on strategy, and have now started to really focus on their senses as they read. They like calling it a "movie in my brain!"

To wrap our unit we had students connect the two strategies they have learned so far (Making Connections was the strategy for September). We gave students a chart that had them make a connection that helped them visualize what they were seeing in the book. Of course, we modeled how to do this with our read aloud Ida B.


Here are some examples:

Sorry they are sideways...couldn't get them to flip.

On Friday we then ended the unit with a game. Students were all given a white board and a dry erase marker. They played this game with their table groups. One person was to draw a picture and describe it to the rest of the group. They were then to draw what they visualized based on the words of his description. When they were done...they all revealed their white boards to compare their visualizations to see if they were close. They loved it...and got excited when they were close. Here are a few: 

Wish I could add more...but still figuring out how to blank out students faces. 

We are finally to the point of publishing our memoirs. Once students were done with their drafts they received this sheet:

Front

 Back

Before handing it to a peer editor, they wrote down what they wanted feedback on...they really took this to heart and wrote down things they were unsure about: "not sure if my quotation marks are right," "I don't like my ending, anything else I can do?" "What other words can I use besides "ran"?"

The editor then filled in the paper, gave them feedback...shared their editing with their writer and then handed the paper to us. This gave us a great draft check before we headed into publishing. (A great way to get a few points in for a grade.)

We are now publishing their stories in blank Bare Books. We will put all of their writing from the year in this book. So they are just putting simple decoration around the writing. They don't mind though because they keep flipping to the extra pages in the book....looking forward to filling in the rest of the pages with more writing!

Next week is just a three day week, and we are celebrating everything pumpkin, from writing to a pumpkin drop! Looking forward to posting next week!

Images and Graphic Design

If I had to do it all over, I think I would have put more interest in my passion to draw and create. Thanks to my friend Lisa I am exposed to so many fun graphic designs. She just shared this link on her blog Making Home Homemade.

I love these simple graphic designs for some of my favorite tales:

One of my favorite whimsical artists is Masha Dyans. I am sooo excited about purchasing her 2012 calendar already! 

Masha Dyans

I also wanted to share one of my favorite songs right now. Our church did this song at a service, and I honestly thought it was something they had written due to the style of the music. Enjoy its message and beautiful music....you will have it in your head for a while. 

Check out more from this artist: Gungor

Next post...Classsroom update!

It's a Saturday of catching up!

Giving Tree and Show, Don't Tell Writing

Teachers love classics to come up with a new idea for students. What we realized with The Giving Tree, is that we may think all students are familiar with it, but we were surprisingly mistaken. Many of our students did not know of the book!

We used the book to visualize character change, and to then describe in writing how both the tree and the boy changed from the beginning to the end of the book. While we read, students described what they saw the tree and the boy looking like for each phase. We created a class visualization map:

In writing we just completed one of my favorite lessons. I write on the board "The teacher was angry." I then go around acting angry at the students. I receive some giggles, and some seriously get concerned. I stop after about a minute. I then ask, what did I do to SHOW that I was angry. I write down what they say. After recording several responses I then repeat the sentence using the details of how I acted angry. You need to emphasis how much better it sounds when you SHOW what the character does, versus just telling what they are feeling. 

We then set up our Writer's Notebooks into six sections, and wrote down six different emotions: sad, happy, sick, surprised, embarrassed,  and having fun. Each table is then assigned an emotion. We go around the room and each table acts out that emotion for five seconds. The rest of the students watch the group, and then write down what they saw. We tell them to notice what they are doing with their face, hands, etc. Then as a class we record all the details we saw. This becomes an anchor chart for our room: 

We are moving into publishing this week...can't wait to share some final products :)

Teacher Tube -- getting through the blocks

Just wanted to share a great resource for teachers that I just discovered. Our internet at school is very strictly blocked. I loved using YouTube videos for several of my lessons, but that got blocked too. One of my teacher friends shared that there is now a TeacherTube that is not blocked by school security. All of the videos are censored, but a lot of the videos I love are on there.

One of my favorites recently is this one....great for teachers and everyone:

This connects to YouTube, but you can also find it on Teacher Tube.
What a great way to teach idioms :)

Off to Columbus this weekend...so hopefully more to post about come Sunday.

Visualizing to Timelines

Today I have to give all the credit to my student teacher :)
It is so refreshing to watch new ideas at work.

In reading today, she read aloud the book Scarecrow by Cynthia Rylant. While students listened they wrote down details that helped them visualize the scarecrow. Things like: birds on arms, button eyes, rough clothing, pumpkins all around, worm at his lapel, and a constant smile. Students were then given time to put their words into color and created a picture of the scarecrow they visualized. They were to then write 2-3 sentences explaining why they drew the scarecrow the way they did. Here is what they produced:

 

 

 

In social studies we focused on transportation time lines and how transportation helped Ohio. Students were given a time line, a series of reading strips, and pictures of the type of transportation. They were to read the reading strip find the picture that went with the reading and put it on the time line according to the date they read in the reading. 

My student teacher wanted them to talk about why that transportation was important, but they didn't :( Therefore we reflected that we should have had them write a quick sentence on the timeline on why that form a transportation was important. While students love to talk...you can't force them to.

Tomorrow we are doing more writing with our memoirs...so stay tuned!