I looove when kids go above and beyond what's assigned, especially when that extra effort happens outside of school. To recognize such hard work, we have an Extra Homework Chart in our classroom. I encourage students to let me know if they do any work at home that relates to reading or writing. This could be in the form of a research project on a topic of their choosing, an extra writing, a Google Slides presentation associated with something we're learning about in class, etc. For every complete extra homework (that shows time and effort) I receive from a student, I put a sticker next to that student’s name on our Extra Homework chart. For every ten stickers, students are rewarded with a homework pass to use whenever they wish to forgo the daily assigned ELA homework. There's also a little competition aspect in that at the end of the school year, the student in each homeroom with the most stickers gets a bigger reward, like a gift card to Porter Square Books. Sometimes I give optional assignments for which students can earn extra homework credit, like our recent Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing project. Fifteen students opted to do one of the choices for the project, which ranged from book-based board games, "Wanted!" posters, newspapers, videos, and even quizzes. I was super impressed, and it was fun to have those kids share their creative projects with their classmates.

In ELA this week, students did their first formal text-based writing of the school year. They wrote about a character from an excerpt of The Chronicle of Narnia, and I was actually super pumped with how well so many students were able to organize their thinking and provide text evidence to support their central idea about that character. We also continued drafting our personal narratives, and some kids are on to the revising stage. To emphasize the importance of incorporating description into our writing, I played a little trick on the kids. For both homerooms, I took students by surprise by throwing a seemingly random and overdramatic "fit". I pretended I was super angry--slamming the door, stomping around the room, clutching my hair with clenched fists. It lasted about a minute or so, and the kids sat there in perplexed silence as they watched their teacher seem to lose her mind a bit. But then I cut the room's tension by stopping my tantrum and informing the kids that I was just acting. The room erupted in chatter, the kids sharing how confused (and slightly frightened!) they were. We then headed to the rug, where they shared what they saw and felt during my "explosion of anger". The kids came up with lots of descriptive sentences that went beyond just "she was mad". In fact, not once did I say that I was mad during the episode; rather, the students inferred the feeling by my body language and behavior. And that's exactly what we want to do when we write: we want to show our reader what's happening in our story, not just tell our reader. This idea is called "showing not telling", and it'll be a major writing focus this school year. All in all, the lesson was both entertaining and successful!

Our Bucket Fillers this week were Eric and Hannah. I was really happy with Eric's grasp of the story we read, and he did an awesome job in our small group for the character writing. I hope we can continue to develop his confidence this school year, because he has lots of good ideas and insight that make him a valuable member of our classroom community. Another standout for me was the way Hannah was able to make sense of the story and explain her text evidence to support her character traits. That explanation component of text-based writing is the most challenging part for most kids, and students often tend to limit themselves to one sentence that doesn't clearly convey the link between their evidence and their central idea. Well, Hannah knocked this part of the writing out of the park. Her hard work in general made me proud. Nice job, Hannah!