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!

  

  

 

    

Our first day of Book Clubs was this past Wednesday, and I'm happy to report that it was a success! The kids seem really into their books, and they're doing a great job of assigning themselves a fair number of chapters to read by next Wednesday. It's awesome to see them excited about reading and talking about reading, and the breakfast treats definitely didn't hurt either...

We've shifted our focus to characters in fiction, and how we can infer character traits based on what a character says, does, and thinks. In past years, I've noticed that kids tend to use the same traits again and again--nice, mean, funny, brave. So this year, I'm trying something new: character trait of the day. So far, we've added the words imaginative, considerate, optimistic, pessimistic, and rational to our vocabulary. In addition, we've discussed the difference between character traits and physical traits, and this upcoming week, we'll differentiate between a character's traits and character's feelings. In writing, I introduced various strategies for starting off a narrative with an engaging lead, referred to as a 'hook'. We looked at some samples of popular books and how authors hooked the reader using dialogue, onomatopoeia, description, a question, etc., and students brainstormed a bunch of different hooks for their own writing.

It was a pleasure meeting so many parents during our Open House on Thursday. It was wonderful to hear some of the positive things kids are saying about their fourth grade experience thus far, and I'm hopeful that we'll get an even bigger turn out for conferences.

Our Bucket Fillers for the week were Julie and Lila. Julie is so bright. She's a great writer, and I love how she internalizes what we discuss in class. I can tell she's paying attention and soaking in the vocabulary words we cover, because she is able to naturally weave them into classroom discussions days later. Lila is also fabulous. She's such a sweet girl, always eager to help others when in need. I frequently notice her supporting her classmates, and I know that her motivation for doing so isn't getting recognition, but rather, she's just a genuinely kind girl. I love that!

 

I'm lucky to get to work with some really awesome and talented educators, and Ms. Ward (the 6th grade ELA/SS teacher) is one of the names at the top of that lengthy list. It's hard to believe that this is just her second year at the Kennedy, as she has become such a valuable member of our staff and warm presence in our hallway. I'm also lucky that Ms. Ward is a close friend of mine, and that we enjoy working together so much that we seek out opportunities for our students to collaborate and learn from each other. And that's just what happened this past Tuesday. Ms. Ward and her sixth grade crew came in to our classroom, and this time, the topic was map skills--the perfect fit for us, as we've recently begun our own focus on maps. We matched up each fourth grader with one or two sixth graders, who were tasked to teach their younger peers the key vocabulary associated with maps. This was also ideal timing for us because we're just getting started on our social studies art project, which involves learning about the fifty states through several different types of maps. 

In ELA this week, we began exploring figurative language. We'll spend more time analyzing figurative language in our poetry unit, but it's important that students begin recognizing and making sense of similes, metaphors, and personification when they come across them in their reading. In addition, students will be expected to incorporate figurative language and description into their own writing this year.

Our Bucket Fillers this week were Donovan and Chris. Donovan was a participation monster this week. He showed attentiveness and a growth mindset with his continual willingness to put his hand up and share his thinking, and that was particularly noticeable during some of the more challenging class discussions we've had recently. Chris really impressed me with the summary he wrote this week. He was able to take the important information from a story and incorporate that information into a clear, well-written summary. He was also super eager to begin reading his book club book upon receiving it on Friday, and I love when I see my students show overt enthusiasm for reading!

  

This week, we began our first official reading and writing units, and they share a focus: narratives. In reading block, we'll be reading primarily fiction texts, turning our attention to the elements of fiction like characters, setting, plot, and theme. On Monday, we ended up applying the typical plot structure of stories to comic strips, with the kids working in small groups to label their assigned comic with literary words like conflict and resolution. These ranged from Peanuts to Denice the Menace to Calvin and Hobbes. This was definitely a challenging task, but many groups did a really nice job making sense of their strip and implementing what they learned. We also talked about how we can use this typical story pattern to help us summarize. A similar prewriting strategy is called "Somebody In Wanted But So Then". This helps kids pull out the most important information prior to writing a summary, which is an important skill that we'll be doing a lot of this year. In writing, we've discussed what makes a story engaging to read, and used these ideas to help us brainstorm a topic for our first processed writing of the school year, which will be a personal narrative. Aligning our fiction reading unit and personal narrative writing unit allows kids to see strong writing strategies in action.

We also celebrated "We Belong Week" this week. School-wide activities for this community week included banner and t-shirt decorating, buddies, and class discussions on topics like belonging and inclusion. Both homerooms got to read with the first graders on Wednesday, which was fun. And we had a blast decorating t-shirts on Thursday. Ziyad made me laugh with his realization after he finished his design... (picture evidence to the right--I promise he said I could!)

Our Bucket Fillers this week were Samar and Natalie. What sweet, hardworking young ladies they both are. Samar has been working on an extra writing since the beginning of the year that's now several pages in length. She's also really attentive and kind to those around her, and I'm really looking forward to having lunch with her on Monday. Natalie is always helping me put out supplies and clean up the classroom, and she is consistently engaged in classroom lessons and discussions. I'm sure she'll be getting Bucket Filler quite a few times this school year! :)