IPC Integration

This morning's language arts pods found students integrating their IPC topic: Explorers and Adventurers, with various language arts tasks.  While we still did our pods with technology (Into the Book) and continuing to work on our novel study final project, the students also did a read and respond activity where they read a nonfiction card about early exploration while the teacher led pod worked on eliciting information from an article we read yesterday, Ancient Adventurers.  I was extremely pleased with the amount of focus and on task work the students showed this morning.

In a World of Fantasy

Students are starting their fantasy genre unit in language arts - reading this week.  Students are in various groups which are each reading a different novel based on our genre.  Today students did an initial activity with predicting and questioning, along with other pods of read to self, grammar based activities on subject and predicates, and some journalling as we're always practicing our writing skills.

Reading Pods

Keeping our routine consistent is important in 4th Grade Purple.  Even though we were down a few members due to a day off tomorrow and many students gone until then, we still participated in our language arts pods.  Reading focused students did a variety of activities that utilized their reading skills in many ways.

Manipulating Graphics

During computer time today students learned how to manipulate graphics for their novel study title pages.  First they opened up their previously saved document, and then searched for images on Google Chrome that would represent aspects of their book.  They then copied and pasted their picture from the internet into their word document.  Next they learned how to wrap the text so they could move the picture freely on the page.  After doing this guided, each student then did it independently and saved their work.  It was great to see how quickly the students picked up on this skill.

Podding It Up

During our language arts pods today, students incorporated two new activities to add to their language repertoire.  Two of our regular pods, teacher led and reading online, were part of our morning.  But today we also participated in a sentence mix up activity where each student chose a sentence from their novel, cut it apart then gave it to a partner to reassemble.  And our second new activity was free write, which we've done before, but using MS Word and then saving our work on our USBs independently.  I love seeing how involved the students get in their work and in honing their language and tech skills.

Free Write via MS Word

Sentence mix-up fun

Read aloud our novel to a partner, checking for comprehension as we read

Reading online, National Geographic Young Explorers

Reading Response via Tech

Incorporating technology into our language arts program is very important to 4th Grade Purple.  One way we try to do this is by using our kidblogs to post our thoughts and responses.  Today students did a reading response telling what they know about the main character in their novel.   Please check them out if you'd like to know more about our characters.

KidBlogs - Character Reading Response

A Novel Activity

As we progress through reading our novel, students do various activities to showcase different elements of the text, check comprehension, analyze aspects related to characters and plot, and more!  Today we looked at character's feelings (with story proofs) and wrote summaries to show we understood and could reiterate events in chronological order.  In addition to this, we worked on finding and creating wonderful verb lists that will aid us in our Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs paragraph/narrative writing.

Feedback from Feedback

Last week students began their novel studies.  We have 3 different novel studies going in the room, each geared at students level and to incorporate differentiation in the classroom.

One of the first activities the students did was to predict what the novel was about, using clues from the cover (title, pictures, back writing).  After doing so, I provided feedback to each student in the form of a question, to help them engage their thinking.

Today, in their groups students gave feedback to each other on the feedback I'd given.  So, one student at a time would read their prediction and the accompanying question, then the other students would take turns answering the question for their peer.  This continued until all members in the group had provided feedback, then the next student would read their prediction and receive feedback from their peers.  The students and I discussed this method of conversational peer learning and they agreed that it helped them learn how to write a more in depth, detailed, comprehensive prediction next time.