I'm not going to lie, Tuesday's snow day was a welcomed day off. Though we'd just come back from a four-day weekend--and you'd think that those extra days would've allowed for time to get caught up and prepared for the week--I left school Monday afternoon craving a snow day and vowing to myself that if we got one, I'd make it a day of epic productivity. And that it was! I finally feel (almost) back on track in the correcting department, and students will be reviewing my feedback in their writing notebooks this upcoming week.

In our integrated nonfiction reading and social studies unit, we've been using various texts on our assigned landmarks to apply strategies for finding the main idea of a text. Sometimes the main idea of a nonfiction passage is clearly stated, or evident from the title or heading(s). But other times, we need to infer the main idea by thinking about what the information and details in the text have in common. It's in times like these, when the main idea is implied, that it can be especially challenging for students to identify and word the text's main idea. But one strategy I've found super helpful for kids is first recognizing the text's primary structure, which is how the information in the text is organized. There are five main nonfiction text structures: chronological sequence, compare and contrast, description, cause and effect, and problem and solution. Figuring out how the author chose to organize the information in a text gives the reader clues about how it's intended to be read and what is most important in the text--it can lead the reader to the main idea! And we have some helpful sentence frames for each text structure that can scaffold our wording of that main idea so that it is clear and concise. We'll continue applying this strategy as we progress through this unit.

Usually when kids take the time to participate in optional assignments, I don't think I could be any more excited and impressed. But I'm quickly proven wrong when kids take the time to put in that extra effort over a holiday weekend, and that's exactly what happened this past week. I'd given kids the option of earning extra credit stickers for a turkey-themed persuasive writing. Participating students had to take on the role of "Tom the Turkey" and write a letter or speech to "Farmer Don" convincing the farmer that he should spare him this year as Thanksgiving dinner's main dish. Several kids opted to take part, and their creative reasons and convincing letters cracked me up. I had a few students even turn in the letters inside envelopes addressed to Farmer Don! It was super cute, and I snapped photos of some of those hardworking students sharing their writings with the class, so be sure to check them out below.

One of the participating students was Annabelle, who happened to be one of our Bucket Fillers this week. Annabelle is as thoughtful as they come. She is constantly helping out around the classroom, and her little gestures of kindness and notes of gratitude are always highlights of my week. For Mrs. O'Keefe's homeroom, Tesla was our Bucket Filler. One characteristic I really appreciate about Tesla is that he gets right to work as soon as he gets into the classroom at the start of our ELA block. When we have a Quick Write, he's often the first to start his writing and the last to finish. That kind of effort should be celebrated, and I'm pumped that his name was pulled as our Bucket Filler this week. It's well-deserved!