Emily Carr

Week of Oct. 12th 

This week we started one of several lessons which focus on writing a personal narrative. We discovered a personal narrative is simply a true story about you. This can be tricky for students, so supporting them to break this task down with several mini-lessons is extremely beneficial. Our first mini-lesson was designed to help them understand what a personal narrative is and how to brainstorm a topic that they feel is worth writing about. When we brainstorm we think about all of the different things we can write about and find the best possible topic to write about. When you brainstorm personal narrative topics you can think about memories you have about things that have happened to you, fun things you have done with your family or friends trips you have taken or special places you have visited, activities you have done at school or anything else that has happened to you in your life. We discussed that it is important to choose a topic that you care about and remember lots of details about. We created a brainstorming sheet that shows six things they feel would make a good topic through the use of simple sketches and a few words to remember their ideas. Our next mini-lesson this week will be to choose one topic from our brainstorming sheet and learn how to be on how to plan and pre-write our story. 

This week we also introduce the Fab 4 Reciprocal Reading Strategies.  Reciprocal teaching is a supported discussion technique that incorporates four main strategies that good readers use together to comprehend the text they are; predicting, questioning, clarifying and summarizing. Our focus this week was a lesson that helps us implement predicting skills prior to reading a story. As a class, we discovered that so many clues about a story can be gathered just by looking closely for clues on the cover and paying close attention to the title of a book. The title can also provide clues as to what the main problem in a story might be. We chose the book "Those Shoes" by Maribeth Boelts and came up with our own predictions about what will happen in the story. Then we created a storyboard showing what we feel our prediction is with regards to the story's problem.  Once our own individual predictions were made, each child was given a question to answer and reflect upon in a small group.  After our discussion, we listened to the story and evaluated how close our predictions were to the actual story.