Thursday, March 5 class

On Thursday, Kelly read the book The Keeping Quilt, by Patricia Polacco. This book takes readers through each generation of the writers' family through their use of a family quilt. The words are simple, yet personal, and the pictures are entirely in brown except for the quilt in each picture. Although this book may not seem like a typical "informational" text, it is a nonfictional story and includes culture and history.

Kelly also passed around the Young Explorers book, Human Body. Although it is not a book that Kelly chose to read aloud to the group, it would be a great book to have as a resource, and children would have a blast looking through the pop-up pages.

After the read-aloud, we traveled to the Reflector to work on creating a way to present our groups' 6-traits books by utilizing technology.

Our homework is to finish our 6-traits books' technology, and remember that our next article response is also due on Tuesday!

Idea Trait: Wordle by Devin, Betsy, & Jenna

Rosa by Nikki Giovanni (Devin Erdal)
http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/615416/Rosa

SouperChicken by Mary Jane Auch (Betsy Richmond)
http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/615398/SouperChicken

Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak (Jenna Guarino)
http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/615425/Where_The_Wild_Things_Are

Voice 6+1 Trait

Hello everyone! So we now have a blog for the voice 6+1 Trait, it's my old blog. So the address is caitiegraham.blogspot.com.

Sentence Fluency

Testing Miss Malarkey by: Judy Finchler
She Did It! by: Jennifer A. Ericsson
Move Over Rover! by: Karen Beaumont
King Bidgood's In the Bathtub by: Audrey Wood
The Little Boat by: Kathy Henderson
Can I Bring My Pterodactyl to School Ms Johnson? by: Lois G. Grambling
Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb by: Dr. Seuss
Snowball Fight! by: Jimmy Fallon

These are examples of sentence fluency because they rhyme, have repetition, various sentence lengths, and have a cadence quality.

My blog

Ok so I jumped on the band wagon and made a blog for my self... it's in the followers category :).

Tuesday, March 3rd :)

Today, I started off the class by sharing two writing samples from my kindergarten class. I decided to bring in two examples because they were short and they were so different from each other. They were really interesting to observe and reflect on! As a class, we talked about what each student did well on and what they could improve on too.

Then we moved on to talk about the Obama speech and discussed the 6+1 traits. We had a class discussion about what made each part that specific trait. One trait that seemed difficult to find was presentation.

Juanita then asked us to think about two important things: how we communicate with friends and family and what kinds of electronic technology we own. After thinking and discussing these questions, we were placed into groups based on the picture book that we brought in for class. (what trait it portrayed) In these groups, we were to think about how to send a list of our books to the class using technology. (she encouraged us to stay away from email!) This basically led us to the end of class time.

Our homework for Thursday: keep thinking about ways we can send our group's list. We will work on it next time!

GREAT CLASS TODAY! :)