Heavy Lifting...
To think that this time last week I was fully stuffed from Thanksgiving and practicing some thankfulness, I would have to say that this week has flown by (and it was a pretty good week, too)! I can''t say that some of the drama between the kids has decreased following the long week, but we worked our way though it.
We have some pretty heavy lifting coming up in the next week with a new writing project starting up, so I am hopeful the students will be successful. We are beginning a writing unit on informational writing, and the students are going to be writing animal books on an animal of their choosing. Informational writing is always a bit daunting because the students are excited at the beginning and then quickly become frustrated during the research phase when they struggle with finding facts about their animals. The students always seem to think that the facts that they need will just pop up on the page and say, "Look right here, these are all the facts that you should write down about your animal!" Hopefully the front loading with lessons on text features and identifying key words will pay off. A few well-placed anchor charts should hopefully assist the students as well. Another obvious struggle is the problem of finding appropriate texts at the students' varied reading levels. It's difficult to find good digital resources at a 3rd grade level to begin with (it seems that a lot of online research information is geared towards middle school and higher), but there are some out there and my team has been able to amass a collection to aid the students. Luckily, when it comes to reading ability, there have been some nice advances in technology. Google Read and Write has become a nice feature for students to use when they are having a hard time reading a website. Now if there were some technological advancement that would provide the students with the patience to carry out the animal report...
Mindfulness thought for the week: A small act of kindness can cause big results. (I thought this would be fitting following some of the drama we were experiencing early in the week :-)
We have some pretty heavy lifting coming up in the next week with a new writing project starting up, so I am hopeful the students will be successful. We are beginning a writing unit on informational writing, and the students are going to be writing animal books on an animal of their choosing. Informational writing is always a bit daunting because the students are excited at the beginning and then quickly become frustrated during the research phase when they struggle with finding facts about their animals. The students always seem to think that the facts that they need will just pop up on the page and say, "Look right here, these are all the facts that you should write down about your animal!" Hopefully the front loading with lessons on text features and identifying key words will pay off. A few well-placed anchor charts should hopefully assist the students as well. Another obvious struggle is the problem of finding appropriate texts at the students' varied reading levels. It's difficult to find good digital resources at a 3rd grade level to begin with (it seems that a lot of online research information is geared towards middle school and higher), but there are some out there and my team has been able to amass a collection to aid the students. Luckily, when it comes to reading ability, there have been some nice advances in technology. Google Read and Write has become a nice feature for students to use when they are having a hard time reading a website. Now if there were some technological advancement that would provide the students with the patience to carry out the animal report...
Mindfulness thought for the week: A small act of kindness can cause big results. (I thought this would be fitting following some of the drama we were experiencing early in the week :-)
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