Crystal Allen, author of How Lamar’s Bad Prank Won a Bubba-Sized Trophy, will be here on January 22nd to conduct a writer's workshop with our sixth graders. This is a unique, real-world opportunity for our kids to apply a published author's writing process to their own writing. Stay tuned!
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I just stumbled upon an excellent resource to help students recommend or find their next book to read. YourNextRead.com combines brief book summaries along with a visual map to help kids link up with other books and authors similar to those they enjoy. And if they're not happy with the search return, they can just keep clicking the "More Books" button until they find something. Brilliant!
In our Word Study station, we've been using the Pic Collage app on the iPad along with vocabulary words from InsideStoryFlashcards.com. We are focused on words that will enhance our descriptions of setting, character and conflict. Like dappled, gnarled, and neurotic. Here are some superb samples of our work!
Last week we had a surprise visit from our principal and a representative of the Lewisville ISD Education Foundation (L.E.F.) who came to present The E.L.A. Cafe with a big, fat check! The money, funded by the Jackie Dowling Stinemetz Literacy Memorial Grant and in part by the LISD Employee Giving Campaign, will support our balanced literacy stations. For our Listen to Reading station, I'll be purchasing more Playaway audio books with along with hard copies of the same titles for students to follow along with. I'll also purchase more headphones. The remainder of the funds will be spent on more alternative seating to keep our environment station-friendly and, believe it or not, I'm going to buy hundreds of pencils :)
In more ways than one the 2014-2015 school year is off to a fantastic start. What a great group of kids I get to work with! Throughout the week we talked about what we need to do to navigate this messy, noisy, imperfect endeavor we call learning.
I just wanted to share these awesome (and FREE) printable bookmarks. Also, check out these 20 Upcycled Bookmark crafts. Click on the pictures to access the bookmark templates.
Jaylen's haiku poem "Invisible Boy" has been accepted for publication in the next poetry anthology published by Creative Communications. We entered Jaylen's poem in the Spring 2014 Poetry Contest and found out this week that he will be a published poet!
The beautiful thing about a flexible learning environment is that you can change it up often. Rearranging the furniture gives us a fresh perspective and keeps our imaginations sharp. One rearrangement we're not going to like, however, is when the desks are brought in for STAAR.
Oops! We did it again! Our work together is making headlines. The E.L.A. Cafe is proud to represent Hedrick M.S. as the March "Bright Spot" for LISD's Strategic Design initiative.
We've been experiencing a lot of poetry lately under the guise of "play". Many hands-on and digital activities have helped us build our capacity for writing in this often intimidating genre. Magnetic poetry and Haikubes are a big hit with many of the boys as well black out and found poetry, which requires them to rip pages out of old books and hunt for words to build a poem. You can't get much more tactile than that with poetry, can you? And to show off our poetic chops, we've instituted "Open Mic Mondays" using our class karaoke machine. Not a bad way to start the week! We are loving the articles in Harvey Daniels' Texts and Lessons book. There are so many great topics to get us talking during our Socratic Seminars. And these kids have A LOT of insightful, persuasive things to say!
"The more parts of your brain you use, the more likely you are to retain information." - Judy Dodge, author of 25 Quick Formative Assessments for a Differentiated Classroom (Scholastic, 2009) In one of our balanced literacy stations, Word Study, we use the Educreations app on our iPads to work with commonly misspelled words and vocabulary concepts. Students use their finger tips to spell or type words and draw pictures associated with word concepts. They can also record their voices spelling the words and saying the definitions and share their lessons with their peers. So, it's no surprise that the kids come up with really some awesome products. Enjoy! The pictures really tell the story of this student-led quick writing session. Quick writing is a staple at The E.L.A. Cafe. It's been instrumental in silencing our inner-critics and building our writing stamina. Since the beginning of the school year, we've spent a lot of time honing our skills of sharing, listening and supporting each other in our writing. The pay-off is is that the kids are not intimidated to write and they love to share their writing. What more could I ask for? |
Blog AuthorMrs. McCloud is a 6th Grade English Language Arts teacher at Hedrick Middle school and the proprietor of the The ELA Cafe. Archives
January 2015
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