We are finishing up revising our Narrative stories in LA this week- when we return from break we will do the final editing (spelling, grammar, and capitalization) before finishing up this writing unit.
In Social Studies we wrapped up our Native American unit today- we will begin our Age of Exploration unit right after break!
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We have been hard at work on our narrative stories this week! The students are using the skills we learned about show not tell and exploding the moment and incorporating them now into their narratives.
Today the kids all story mapped their narratives by drawing a story arc and putting the different parts of their story on the arc. Students figure out what are the important parts of the story that they are going to want to focus on and the other parts that they can tell quicker- as you can see in the picture below once they put their story on the arc they were able to see where they wanted to show not tell and what moment needed to explode. This activity also helped some students recognize that they didn't have a story - they were really writing more of a summary- and in those cases we were able to either workshop their current idea and figure out together what the focus of the story is and how to tell it, or choose a new idea that actually has a moment that is being led up to. Homework: Read! Today we worked on our explode the moments and a few students in each class were able to share what they wrote with the class. Next week we will be applying this new writing skill to our personal narrative stories.
In Social Studies we read about the Anasazi and Mound Builder tribes and had some great discussions around how they used the land and why they would choose such challenging locations for their settlements. Today the students shared out the information that they learned from the "America Before Columbus" video that we watched last week. We had a discussion about how Europeans were using the land over in Europe and how that was different from how the Native Americans were using the land here.
We continued are work around exploding the moment today- I had the kids all stand up in front of their chairs and then sit down. Then as a class they attempted to explode that moment by stating each of the things that we had to do in order to get from standing to sitting- as they named the actions I would act them out so that they could see what they needed to have me do next. Afterwards, the kids went back into their writing from Tuesday and continued to work on this slow motion writing.
In order to help them check/revise their writing I told them that after they finished they needed to go back over their paragraph and change any thoughts and feelings to blue font, similes and metaphors to green font, and sensory details/show not tell writing to red font. This gives them a visual tool to actually check and see if they have used all the strategies, and provides me with information as well (for instance who doesn't understand what similes/metaphors are). Homework: read Last week in LA the students worked on how to show and not tell in their writing. This week we are building on that skill - today I introduced the strategy: Explode the Moment. I shared several examples with the class and then they had the opportunity to try it themselves. See the pictures below of the some of the examples and then their assignment.
Homework: Read! Today we watched the first part of the video, "America Before Columbus" and while students watched they were taking notes on any information that answers one of our two essential questions: How did farming change the world? and How did Native Americans use and manage the land? We continued our work from Monday on show not tell- some students worked in a smaller group with me, while other students worked on identifying places in their narrative where they can pull out telling sentences and turn them into showing paragraphs.
Homework: Read 30 min Students used the section we read in the textbook last week to find evidence to answer our essential question, "How did farming change the world?" and after the discussion the kids updated their notes with the information.
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