Classroom Activities and lessons
IMG_0975.MOVPoem in Your Pocket Day
This day is used as a culminating activity to conclude our month long study and celebration of poetry during the month of April every year. Students learn about poetic devices, different types of poems, elements of poetry, and different poets. Poem in your Pocket Day is a day to celebrate and share your favorite poem or poet!
Design Your Own T-Shirt Book Project
Every year during the 4th Marking Period, students work on designing and creating their own t-shirt to help with an oral retelling of their favorite book they read during their 5th grade year.
Elements of this activity include:
Book Review
Favorite Quote
Problem and Solution
Summary
Theme
Setting
Book Title/Author/Genre
Puppet Biography
Students choose a biography of a famous individual in our school library using the "Who Was" book series. Upon completion of reading their book, they create a puppet to depict their famous person and give an oral presentation focusing on the key elements and accomplishments of that person's life.
Save Sammy Team Building
“Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”-Steve Jobs This is a collaborative challenge activity where participants have to work together to get a gummy worm into a gummy lifesaver using only 1 paperclip per person. I use it as a stepping stone during the first few days of the year to show students how essential teamwork is for learning.
The Mysteries of harris burdick
Literary analysis is a vital stage in the development of students' critical thinking skills. Text dependent analysis writing has always been difficult for my 5th graders. They struggle with the process of critical thinking and truly understanding the deep meanings in text. I spend a great deal of time trying to encourage them to look beyond the words on the page. Getting to the “why” of the text and moving to analytical writing is the greatest challenge.
I came across The Mysteries of Harris Burdick written by Chris Van Allsburg a few years ago. My students are immediately drawn into the mystery behind the man who is Harris Burdick. Because my students are just beginning to work on text dependent analysis writing, I begin with the use of illustrations to draw inferences using the question stems:
What do you see?
What does it mean?
Why does it matter?
The Mysteries of Harris Burdick lends itself perfectly for an introduction to this type of writing with its mysterious illustrations and captions. As a culminating activity, students choose one of the illustrations from the book and write their own short story.
Mapping out the Text Dependent Analysis Writing Using RACES
After a three day training during the summer on text dependent analysis writing at our Instructional Unit, I created the above graphic organizers to give my students an outline to follow when writing their TDA essays. The mnemonic device RACES was used because that is what my district implements across grades 3-5. The outline itself and what each letter stands for matches the expectations for TDA writing in the 6th grade, so our students are prepared for when they enter middle school and literary analysis becomes a large part of their writing.