Exploring characters

Today was Read for a Better Life at TCI.  We had a lot of great activities for the students including a reading pep rally and some special visitors to our classrooms.  The characters from the "If You Give A..." series were in the Braveheart hallway.  You may recognize them....

In class we read the book Stand Tall Molly Lou Melon.  It's a story of a young girl that is very different from everyone else and her struggle to fit in.   To start our unit on character traits we discussed what character traits are and where they come from.  Next, we drew a picture of Molly Lou in our notebooks (the students pictures were all way better than mine!).  Then we talked about the different between physical traits and personality traits.  We discussed why an author would include both descriptions in a text and how these descriptions help us as readers visualize our reading and our overall comprehension.  Here are a few things we thought of today.

Tomorrow we will be discussing inferences and how we can infer additional information about characters that can help us increase our comprehension.   I can't wait to do some more real reading and of course real thinking!

Wrapping Up The Story Map

This week we will be wrapping up our study of the organization of a fiction text and looking deeper into what advances the plot of the text and gives it richer meaning.

On Monday we worked on stations that allowed us to review our knowledge of the fiction story map.  Some of us applied our knowledge  of story maps to create our our story.  Others read some cool stories Not Norman and Knuffle Bunny and practiced creating a story map.  This proved to be pretty challenging because there were a lot of events that lead to our main character solving his conflict.

We will be taking our test over the fiction story map on Tuesday.

Wednesday will be our Read for a Better Life day.  We will also be starting to look at a fiction text and analyzing the characters we meet and how they change over the course of the story.

To help us better understand character traits, we will also be looking at ourselves.  Please make sure to bring in a picture of yourself by Thursday that can be glued into your Reader's Notebook.

Don't forget, this week's homework is a blog response.  Be sure to go to padlet this week to let me know what you think!

http://padlet.com/kfenske/sept14

Reading Salad

This week we are focusing on building our reading stamina.  We discussed what stamina is and how the only way to increase our reading stamina is to practice reading.  We are able to increase our reading stamina by thinking metacognitively, or thinking about our thinking.  We aren't just going to read the words on the page (that's what fake readers do), we are going to read the text and then try to make connections to ourselves or our previous experiences.  I gave the students the stems below.

Next, we talked about how being a good reader is like making a salad.  The students told me the most important ingredient of a salad is the lettuce.  We decided that the most important thing about reading is the text.  With out the text, you have nothing.  We made one bowl and labeled it "Text" and put oru lettuce inside.

Next, we determined that a salad is rather bland if you just eat lettuce.  The toppings and dressings are what make a salad delicious.  Just like how reading is boring when you just read the words.  When you think about the text and make connections as you read, then a story comes alive.  We then remember what we read, get excited about our text, and have more success as readers.  We took a second bowl and labeled it "Thinking" and added our croutons, tomatoes, carrots, cabbage, and ranch dressing.   

We then practiced being real readers with one of my favorite stories, Dogzilla by Dav Pilkey.  We stopped as we read and made connections to our background knowledge about dogs, our own dogs, and the perspective of our characters to make predictions about the text and better understand what our author was trying to tell us.  When we stopped we used the sentence stem "I text told me...." and then added a lettuce leaf to our salad bowl.  We then followed it up with a sentence stem from our metacognition chart that challenged us to interact with the text and thus become real readers.

As you can see, we created a well balanced salad full of lettuce and all of the toppings.  We will continue to practice our real reading skills over the next several weeks which in turn should help us increase our reading stamina and comprehension.

Welcome to Reading in 5th Grade!

Welcome to Reading in fifth grade!  Our Bravehearts have been getting off to a great start this year.  Our year began with a team building exercise using red plastic cups, string and rubber bands.  We had to move the cups to a pyramid position.

Students could not touch the cups and had to work as a team using a rubberband with string attached.  Here are some students demonstrating how that worked:

Afterwards, we discussed as a group what enabled them to be successful and listed these on a chart.  We decided that these would be our classroom rules.  They will guide us in everything we are doing in class.  They came up with some great ideas!

Now, students are creating their reading timeline We are talking about how we became the readers we are.  Most of it is thanks to our parents and previous teachers.  They read us many great books growing up.  Thank you!  Students are having a great time sharing books.  We are learning that we actually have a lot in common!  I'm looking forward to a great year!