Shared Reading

As we enter in to our last week studying mysteries in reading, students are sharing reading responsibilities.  Reading is done in our classroom as whole class, small group (shared) and independently.  In "detective teams", students read an Encyclopedia Brown mystery together and then worked to solve the mystery.  Tomorrow their deductions and solutions will be shared and we'll see who was able to solve The Case of the Tennis Racket.

ELA Pods

Wednesday mornings we often start our day with reading pods where students participate in a variety of reading, writing, spelling and grammar activities.  It's a great chance for students to use a variety of methods to enhance and showcase their learning, and allows us to work in small groups giving a better student-to-teacher ratio for instruction or proximity of assistance.

Detective Case Reports

RAZ Kids

Blogging - Free Write day

Irregular Verb practice

Sleuthing

We've started our mystery genre unit in ELA and students have taken on the roles of detectives (aka sleuths).  The morning started with learning how to fill out a Detective Case Report; an activity done in a shared method so students could learn and illicit information at the same time.  Next, in partners they read "The Case of the Missing Penny", then during the second read of this short mystery they worked on filling out the case file report.  It's tricky trying to decipher the clues from the plot but I know that these 4th grade sleuths are doing a very good job in working to solve their cases.