This week, we completed Week 4 of the Global Read Aloud Project. Hard to believe we are past the 4 week mark already. Students are very engaged in the project and look forward to seeing what new Peter Reynolds story we will read next. This week as we began reading Sky Color (spelled coloUr with a "U" in Canada), students quickly made many text-to-text connections with other books we previously read during this project. Primarily, their text-to-text connections came from the story ISH.
After reading Sky Color, students made many connections to our on-going discussion on showing grit. In the story, they said that Marisol showed grit by not giving up on creating a sky - even when she did not have any blue. We decided to see what skies can look like without using the colour blue. Have a look at our fun sky colour creations!
In Language, our current focus is writing descriptive paragraphs using adjectives. To prepare students with their ideas for writing, we had our first Talking Circle of the year. Our Talk Circle focus was on
Explaining our text-to-text connections and
agreeing or
disagreeing with the ideas shared.
The Talk Circle helped us to listen to the connections of our peers. We explained our ideas and shared our similar or different viewpoints. Ish and Sky Color have many similarities and the Talk Circle helped us to come up with ideas for our paragraph writing. A lot of rich dialogue was shared - excellent job friends!
Students used the Talking Circle to help them write about the text-to-text connections between Sky Color and Ish. They all believed that the stories are similar. We worked hard on our paragraphs. Students are using a paragraph checklist to keep them on track. The checklist helps them to edit their work to see if they have all of the criteria. The paragraph writing format has inspired many students to write detailed sentences. Adding adjectives helps us to be more descriptive.
Some students had the opportunity to share their work with friends. After writing, we read our paragraphs on the iPad app 30 Hands. Students are learning to use this app to create slideshow presentations featuring photos and audio clips of their work. We hope you enjoy our Sky Color and Ish paragraph reading. We are wondering if anyone has similar text-to-text connections like we found? We are also wondering if anyone has different text connections than what we wrote about? Please share with us on our
Twitter page!
September 15th is International Dot Day. An interactive initiative hosted by Peter H. Reynolds the author of many famous books including The Dot. The author invites readers to celebrate their Dot Day by collaborating, creating, connecting and celebrating the power of a simple dot. Students make their mark by starting with a dot and finding out where it might take them.
In our class we began the day by brainstorming with friends how we might demonstrate our growth mindset. Students chatted about what the words meant to them and came up with phrases, words or advice to share. Some key words that we came up with the most: Try, GRIT, believe, guess and more! The best part, one of the messages they said over and over was: "It's OK to make mistakes, because that's how we learn". Our class works so well together and I was so impressed with how invested they were in this activity. Ask your child about it! We completed our day with dot art using q-tips. Once the photos are dry we will put them up to remind ourselves to try our best and believe in what we can accomplish together as a class!
