News+11-16


 * Brown’s Blurb**
 * November 16, 2006**


 * Reader’s Workshop:** We have been using articles from Storyworks to work on specific reading skills that encourage better comprehension. We read a nonfiction piece titled, “The Spider Woman,” to work on understanding the author’s purpose, identifying factual information, making judgments, and then forming opinions based on new information. We also read an article about two famous football players and then worked on comparing and contrasting these two stars through well supported paragraphs.

Much of our reading these next few weeks will come from books we are studying in Social Studies. Our genre focus will be historical fiction. Through examining multiple examples of the genre, students discover that setting is the most important element of historical fiction because the time period must be portrayed accurately.

Throughout November and December, mini-lessons during class will focus on the comprehension strategy, summarizing. Students will practice paraphrasing, getting the gist, picking out the important information in a text, while continuing to monitor their comprehension by tracking their thoughts.


 * Writer’s Workshop:** We will use what we are learning about historical fiction to write our own historical fiction pieces. The students have started to write journal entries in their writer’s notebooks as if they were passengers on the Mayflower.


 * Social Studies:** We have started our Colonial America unit and the class is very excited. This unit will be very different from our previous units because we are trying something new: an inquiry driven unit in which the students will guide their own learning based on the thoughts and questions they want to explore. We started the unit by discussing why we thought the Pilgrims had left England for the New World. We charted all of our predictions and then went back and checked off all of the reasons that we learned about in our reading. Right now, we are reading all kinds of interesting books and articles about The Pilgrims and their voyage on the //Mayflower.// We are just beginning to discuss what happened once the Pilgrims made it to the New World. What did the Native Americans think? Naturally, perspective is a big idea that we are discussing. Students are learning that we must consider all perspectives in order to gain a more realistic understanding of what occurred when Colonial America gave birth to the United States of America.

I am very fortunate to be a representative for Wesleyan in a one-year professional development program that is led by nationally acclaimed experts on 21st Century learning practices. In this program, we are learning how to use Web 2.0 tools to enhance learning in the classroom. I will be bringing these new ideas and implementing them in the classroom with the students. We have started with a blog and we will move next to a wiki. A wiki is a website that anyone can edit easily using a regular web browser. Wikis encourage collaboration and shared knowledge construction. The students and I will use wikis for publishing, organizing, and sharing content. We are going to create a Colonial American wiki as a culmination project at the end of our unit. Hopefully, other classrooms across the country can use our wiki to help them learn about this time period. I can’t wait to begin this process!
 * Technology:**

-- access our blog: [|**http://brownthird.blogspot.com**] -- Tuesday, November 20- Grandparent’s Day from 1:00-3:00 -- November 21-23- No school (Happy Thanksgiving!) -- Reading responses will be due December 3-7 -- Bookmarks are due Monday, December 3rd
 * Reminders:**
 * --**Thursday, November 29th- Spanish quiz