Examples of Student Work
Reading
I have taught reading using Fountas and Pinnell's Guided Reading and Writing for years.
Here is a sample of a reading response letter that was submitted as an attachment on Edmodo.
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Here you will also see a project I had my students do after learning about character traits called a "Book Face."
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Poetry
One of my favorite writing concepts to teach is poetry. Sometimes the writers who struggle the most with other genres excel in poetry.
Here are samples of a poetry project that two of my fifth-grade students did last school year based on a project I modeled after Miss Cantellion's 5th Grade Poetry Project.
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Here is a different poetry project, point of view poems, that were meant to teach students about perspective in reading as well as writing.
Kennedy wrote from the point of view of a soccer ball, ice cream, tape and a pencil. |
Genre Studies
Genre studies in my class start with using a writer's notebook to gather ideas. Some of the genre studies I have taught are mysteries, personal narratives, adventure, fantasy, feature articles, research report, tall tales, and biography.
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The idea of heart-mapping comes from Georgia Heard's book, Awakening the Heart: Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School.
This year, I used this idea to help fourth-graders get their seed ideas for other writing projects, an idea that Denise Leograndis uses in her book, Launching the Writer's Workshop.
The video shows heart maps my fourth-graders created this year. |
This is Evan's mystery, "Diamonds." While he did not quite get the element that mysteries are supposed to keep the reader guessing about who committed the crime, it still is a well-written story.
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With our tall tales unit, students created ideas in their writer's notebooks first. They created a "larger than life" character and drew that character on chart paper.Then they drafted the stories out using tall tale elements.
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Math
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This is a lesson that I taught with both my class and another teacher's class. The kids were struggling with what area meant. So we decided to make it a little more fun by taking them outside, drawing shapes on the sidewalk, having them measure, and then calculate the area of triangles and rectangles.
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Fact Challenges
One of the best ways we've learned to get our students to study their basic math facts is with a little healthy competition! This is video of one of our days of fact challenges. The students never know until the day of the competition which operation they will be challenged with. They compete against the other fourth-grade classes.
Here is a video of one of our fact competitions. |