Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Plants and the NBA!

Today we explored the inside of a seed! Each student received a lima bean that had been soaked in water to open up and examine! We created this super simple class anchor chart to share what we saw.


The kids were so surprised that a seed has many of the same characteristics and needs many of the same things as we do!

Third trimester is also our big trimester for non-fiction retells in our district. They can get to be a little monotonous at times with all of the practice so I always try my best to spice it up for them and select topics of interest! My boys are absolutely OBSESSED with basketball. One of them bought me this book that I shared with you a week or two ago at the book fair that shares short biographies on a variety of "NBA heroes".


I read about one of the players for my students and modeled an example of how to retell the section. The black words are the key words the students should use in their retells. The orange are the words I used related to my particular text.


After this, I put my students in groups of three and gave each group a photocopy of a photo of their player and the information in the text about them. The groups had to work together to read the text, then using my example as a guide, write their own retell of the section!



And here is our finished product to add to our retelling wall...


Seriously...my boys peed their pants they were so excited about this!







3 comments:

  1. I love this! I say find where their passion is and channel it into reading and writing. I became an expert on the wrestler Eddie Guerrero one year because I had a struggling reader that would agree to read any text I could find about him. It's crazy how their reading level goes up when their interest is high!

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  2. That writing activity is great! Your students must be super motivated. Well done!

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