The students did a fantastic job sharing their small moment stories with our guests yesterday and today. I continue to be amazed by the incredible talent of these children! Below are some photos taken during our two days of Writers' Cafe!
During independent reading, students are learning how wise readers make choices. They are becoming more aware of the genres they like to read, are developing a bank of favourite authors, and are writing weekly letters to me that share their thinking about the books they are reading.
I often meet with small groups/individual readers, during the independent reading portion of our day, and it is important for students to understand what their job is when this is happening. This past week, we discussed what it means to read 'with stamina'. Together, we created a chart listing what reading stamina was, why we feel it is important to have, and barriers we may have to overcome in order to keep our stamina high. We conducted 'stamina checks' at the end of our independent reading time, and self-scored our stamina. Below you will see our stamina chart, as well as a picture I snapped during one of our reading times. It may look like this photo was posed, but it wasn't! This group of students was working hard on strengthening their reading stamina, and didn't even let my camera break it. They did, however, recommend that I add myself and my camera to the list of possible barriers (which you can see was duly noted on our chart)! Media literacy is defined by The Ontario Curriculum as "an informed and critical understanding of the nature of the media, the techniques used by them, and the impact of these techniques. Also, the ability to understand and use the mass media in an active, critical way."
Students gain a lot of the information about the world around them through their experiences with media texts. In class, we have been learning that media texts are a lot like other written texts - there is always an author, a purpose, and a message. We have been exploring the media forms of commercials, music videos, and print advertising. We have also been finding ways to tie our media study to other curriculum expectations. During our study of music videos, we have addressed Dance expectations, as well as many other reading skills such as inferring. Today, we connected our study of print advertising, to our Health focus on smoking. Below are some pictures that capture the richness of our recent classroom discussions: We recently received some feedback from some earlier work we did this year with the book Wilma Unlimited. Mrs. Vanderzwan's grade 3/4 class at Carson Grove P.S. took time out of their busy day to read our responses and offer us their thoughts. Below are some pictures of us reading our feedback from these students, and then using their comments to elevate the quality of our feedback for each other.
...the Grade 3s will explore our Social Studies topic with Miss Burston!
Our Grade 3s took advantage of some alone time with Miss Burston while the Grade 4s and I headed off for our MacSkimming field trip. With the help of some very helpful Grade 5 students, the children read about, and discussed, some of the different features in urban and rural communities. Below are some pictures taken by Miss Burston. |
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April 2012
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