This week we're wrapping up our Harris Burdick mystery stories - they are looking pretty awesome! This is a group + independent project. Students created an idea for their stories as a group, but are writing their own part of the story independently to piece together with the rest of their group members' stories.
In the sample above, this student began their story using lots of fantastic description (turquoise and pink boxes). As the story began, actions started to appear, as well as emotions and thoughts of the character. As students write, I can access their work in real-time through Google Classroom. Through this, I get to meet with students one-on-one throughout the writing process (my favourite part!!). We engage in discussions and mini-lessons focussed on exactly their needs. For example, if a student's work was all written in orange boxes, we might discuss strategies to avoid writing just dialogue, and how we could include scene description or character action in between the characters' words. If a student was struggling with masculin/féminin words, we might discuss simple solutions to finding out the response independently - a tool they will use in their writing forever! I encourage you to log into Google Classroom (or Drive) with your child to see their story. I prefer that they not work on them at home, as much of their learning comes from the in-class conferences, but please feel free to discuss some of my feedback that I've commented along the side of their paragraphs. A few of other student examples below for both Grade 5 and 6...
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A short post for you - all about how we are developing our writing. I noticed from last week when we took apart our writing feedback that many students really needed to work on comma splices and run on sentences, as well as adding descriptive detail and vocabulary into their writing. We've been learning how we can properly use commas, and how to join sentences when a comma won't quite work. Students learned about using either:
We've been practicing various sentences, and I'd love to show you some of their work. In the document below, you'll see my original sentence written in RED. Below that sentence, are actual student examples in green of sentences they wrote which improved on my original. Their task was to add a semi-colon, period, or conjunction in the right places as well as bump up the vocabulary and descriptive details. I wanted them to truly paint a picture in my mind of the sentence. They certainly did not disappoint!! These new sentences are RICH with descriptive language. In English, my first sentence was: In the distance there were wolves they howled at the moon. Want to practice at home?
Invent ANY sentence for your kids, and then ask them to add the proper punctuation and bump up the descriptive language and vocabulary. Here are a couple boring and grammatically incorrect sentences you could start with...
One of the BEST parts of teaching is looking at student work. Their ideas are always incredible - fresh, different, and exciting. I especially love looking at student writing... I always get to learn a little bit about each student when I read what they've written. This week, Grade 5s and 6s came home with feedback this week on their writing. They practiced writing paragraphs to convey their thoughts on a book we read, called Quand on était seuls. After completing the writing process (they brianstormed, drafted, edited, and revised), students submitted to me their good copy, which I had the pleasure to read. I gave them some specific feedback on a sheet that looked similar to this. Each student received two successes, as well as one or two things that they could work on for next time we write (we've already begun a writing project... our Harris Burdick writing where they're get to apply this feedback). Now... all of this sounds great... but none of it actually matters unless students know what to do with it. What's the point of even getting feedback if you don't get a chance to learn what it means in order to apply it? So that's exactly what we did. Students got their feedback, and then took it apart.
We put our successes on one whiteboard as things we could celebrate in our writing. There was so much success! Students celebrated their work for things like how well they organized their paragraphs, the detail that they included, their rich word choices, and more! Next, we took apart the feedback looking for things we can work on to improve. Students organized their feedback into categories on the second whiteboard. This helps us in a few ways:
Now, when we go to write our Harris Burdick mystery stories, we have a chance to improve and apply our feedback directly to our writing.
Looking forward to seeing students take ownership over their learning and feedback! So who is Harris Burdick? Short answer: we don't know! Long answer: he's the inspiration for our latest narrative story writing. Legend has it (in a book by Chris Van Allsburg, called Les mystères de Harris Burdick), Burdick was an illustrator who dropped of many different images, titles, and one-liners for stories at a publisher's house. He did this in hopes that his stories would become published, and offered to drop off the rest of the stories and the next day at the publisher's. Unfortunately for us… Burdick never dropped off the rest of his stories… and not only that, was never seen or heard from again. There is some good news though... because of this mystery, we now have thirteen incredible story prompts ready to inspire us to write! Take a peek at what we're doing... Students are excitedly investigating the drawn images, titles and subtitles that go with each potential story. In our wordless picture book unit, students learned to read images, and take into account their observations and their background knowledge to form inferences on what the images tell us. They use these skills to try to decipher what each story might be telling.
Once we had investigated all the images, I presented an example image. As teachers, we will often model ways of doing things to the class. I worked through inferences and interpretations of the title with the students to show them the critical thinking I was looking for. Students can always refer back to my model as a guide for their own work. You can see all the details we pulled from a title and a subtitle in the photo below that will add to the inspiration for our own stories. Next, students get the chance to "read" the images. They use observations to make inferences on all the things they see in the images. We modeled this as a class again using my chosen story prompt before students got to try their hand at doing their own. By taking our time before we eventually get to writing our narrative stories, students will be able to gather enough information and inspiration to write detailed stories that pique our interest using new vocabulary, interesting sentences and sentence structures, newly learned grammar conventions, and more.
You'll get to see more of that in the coming weeks. Can't wait to read their creative stories! In French, we are lucky enough to get to learn a whole bunch of other subjects. This includes: Drama, Visual Arts, Science, Social Studies, and Health. In Health currently, we're learning about mindfulness. In other words, we're learning about how our brain works, and how we can use that knowledge to help us learn, and help us become happier, healthier people. We began by looking at what some famous athletes have in common in their journeys to becoming more mindful people. You can see, in detail, who we looked at by clicking here. Our examples included: Steve Nash, Michael Jordan, Carli Lloyd, Simone Biles, and Michael Phelps.
These athletes talked about their sleep habits, their routines for relaxation, how they worked with their teammates, what they ate, how they calmed their brain, and much more. We compiled that information for some ideas of things that we could also do to work on being present and ready to learn or take on a challenge). You can see our brainstorm to the right. Next, we learned about what parts of our brain can help us with these tasks. Our three main focus parts are... our amygdala, our prefrontal cortex, and our hippocampus. You can see what these parts do below, or by going to the presentation under Santé in Google Classroom. Now, students are working on comic strips using Pixton, a digital comic strip creation website. Check out a few student-written examples below! Yup - you read that right! Our wordless picture book unit has been a total hit with students. Anyone, regardless of language, reading levels, abilities, strengths and needs has been able to dive right into the beginning of this unit. The best part? Regardless of their English titles... we've been reading and working with these books in French! We've been reading incredible stories like Chalk by Bill Thomson, The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney, Mirror by Jeannie Baker (if you speak/read Arabic, you'll love seeing this book!), and so many others. Check out the book trailer below for Journey by Aaron Becker to get an idea of how powerful wordless stories can be. The goal of the beginnings of this unit is to learn about inferencing, or making an educated guess, determination, prediction, and developing understanding based on what we know and what we see. What's really neat (and challenging) about inferences, is what actually makes up what we know. Students suggested all the things that influence what they know and therefore influence their inferences. Inferencing serves us really well in MANY ways, for example:
We began learning about this by taking a look at one image from each of those books above. We wrote our observations (what we see) and our questions (what we wonder). Then, we compared our learning and where our observations, questions, and inferences came from on three of the images we studied. We learned that inferences might come from:
Next, we worked on a neat activity where students needed to figure out the definitions of completely made up words based solely on context clues from a short text attached to the word. You can watch these boys try to figure out the word ("un crandidé") on the card on the wall. This made for some in-depth (and hilarious) discussion! Where are we going next with inferencing?
We're moving our unit into a new theme, learning about Canadian residential schools and the Indigenous children who were taken from their families to attend these institutions. We'll be reading the story of Chanie Wenjack using the wordless graphic novel, The Secret Path inspired by Gord Downie's music and illustrated by Jeff Lemire. More on the blog to come! Your kids are awesome! This blog post needs no more explanation than that!
You MUST go see your child's video on our student-made site. Go now! Quick! Enjoy!! There's been lots of creativity buzzing around in our French classroom lately. We're making our Oral French learning visible by planning, filming, creating, and sharing our own videos entitled Dear Future Me. This idea was hatched when myself, Mme Kylie (who teaches Grade 1 and 2 at KHPS) and Mme Suzanne all found ourselves in the same classroom at what can only be described as a teacher's summer camp, the University of Ottawa's Digital Literacies Institute this summer. While we learned about coding, and making, our chosen focus stream was critical video production. Being three French teachers, our big focus and goal for all students of any age is.. to give our students authentic opportunities to speak in French and share their powerful ideas and voices in ways that challenge their thinking and matter to them. So, we dreamed up the Dear Future Me video project. This project allows students to share a little about who they are (with plans of creating a second version of a video in June), a reflection on a full year of learning. They get to speak French (to communicate a message clearly and with expression) to their peers. As teachers, we look to challenge ourselves as learners as well. We created our own version of the video, which we used as a model for our students. Take a peek at ours here: This was the very first big project of the year, so students were guided in their planning. They used two different planning sheets:
Check out some student examples of planning sheets and story-boards below... After mini-conferences and feedback sessions, students began their filming. They used their story-boards to guide the process, and uploaded their clips to their Google Drives to begin integrating them into their projects. We're learning to use a program called WeVideo to create our videos. This is a tool that nobody had ever used before, which was so exciting to me as a teacher. We got to add a new tech tool to our repertoires that we can now use in future projects to share learning. Woohoo! Check out some pictures and videos of students at work... Stay tuned for more updates on this project, and to get to see our final videos! We can't wait to share!
September is a month of fresh starts and new learning. I love getting to know my students - learning what they love, what challenges them, what they're passionate about, and their special talents and skills. Our first writing and art project digs into this idea. Each student in the classroom is more than a student. They have so many experiences from outside of school that make up who they are. Students are sharing who they are through a French writing project. We began with a simple brainstorm of words that describe us... things like artist, creator, explorer, athlete, gamer, engineer, coder, friend, and big sister. What an incredibly talented class we have! From this brainstorm, we branched off into adding any details that came to mind. We added words, different experiences related to the original title, and any important ideas. Then, we transformed this brainstorm into our rough copies. We got to read a model (also in Google Classroom), and then set off to write on our own. The ideas the students are coming up with are incredible - totally brought tears to my eyes a few times reading about their passions and what excites them! They learned from each other on this project too - they got to read some model introductions of students who had written in a neat way to begin their paragraph. Check those out here. Usually - we'd move into editing and revising stations, but this time we did something a little different. I want to see where these students are at in terms of their writing, so instead of our editing and revising stations, each student got a little bit of feedback, we did some one-on-one conferencing, and they did a quick edit on their own. We didn't put too much time into editing because... Students are writing out a "good copy" for you to see at Open House next week, but this won't be the end of our project. Through a series of mini-lessons throughout September and October, students will get to re-work some of these paragraphs and see the magic of editing and revising their own work. They'll get to actually visualize the difference of where they were when they started, and where they are now in their writing. Check out a few samples below. Amazing, right? To go with this Writing... we did a really cool art project with a similar idea. The title is "The Person Behind the Student". These don't really need a description... they'll blow you away on their own!
Bienvenue à notre salle de classe! This blog will be a little window into our French classroom - you'll get to peek at what we're learning. French learning is divided into four interconnected strands: Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking. We will work through these four strands of language in French class, as well as throughout all other subjects that are taught in French. You can access the French as a Second Language curriculum here. To start off, please take a look at this quick presentation (see photo left) that contains an overview of our French learning. You'll find out what subjects are taught in French, what my expectations for Speaking are (Oral French), as well as get access to a bunch of French resources. |
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