Celebrating...
Boys Day!On Tuesday, the creative and talented Ileene came in to our classroom to teach us about the Japanese holiday of Boys' Day. We have been looking forward to this since celebrating Girls' Day with her, and it was well worth the wait. We had so much fun creating samurai hats and puppets and kites and toys. We even had a chance to try some new foods. Thank you, Ileene and Reese for sharing your time and your traditions with us! | Finishing our All About Books!This week, Ms. Wiegand finished teaching her All About informational writing unit. Each student published a piece to share at a class writing celebration on Friday. Students read each others All About books and then gave the writer feedback about what they learned by reading their book. The books were very informative and we learned a lot. The students' books will be scanned this week and posted on e-folios soon. |
Coming up this week in PBL ~ Becoming Collaborative African Animal Experts!
To prepare the students for working in their expert animal groups this coming week, we did a collaborative savanna project last week. After teaching them about the group roles we will be using, we assigned each student a role to practice as they worked with their literacy groups to create a collaborative African Savanna. Before starting, each group came up with a fair plan that would ensure that everyone had a chance to draw and help create the savanna. The savannas are proudly displayed on our class bulletin board and show how much our students have already learned about the African savanna.
At the end of last week, we generated a list of African animals we were most interested in learning about and voted on our top 5. Then, students were given a chance to tell us their top three choices for the animal they would like to become an expert on. This year, our animal groups will focus on giraffes, cheetahs, African dogs, leopards and black mambas!
Turning Animal Facts into All About Books!
This week, students will be assigned new table groups that will also be their animal expert groups. Each group will start our work together by assigning group roles and creating group compacts explicitly stating what we need from each other to collaborate in a productive way. After setting the expectations, students will start generating questions they want to know about their animals and then work together to research these questions and write fact drafts for their books. Once groups have generated lots of fact page drafts and feel like experts, they will sort these facts into chapters. When we have all of the pages drafted, we will edit them for readability, marking them up with purple pens and making them sloppy before using them to write our final drafts and publish our books. This editing process will be an important step in creating our books. If we want other people to learn from our books, they have to be able to read our writing.