PA and TD for the Week of 9-16

Kindergarten whole classes will be coming to my room to make their "dot" for our celebration of creativity and making our mark here at Brookdale.  We will celebrate Dot Day on 9-24. 

First grade will conclude our alphabet journey with the worst alphabet book ever, P is for Pterodactyl. It's actually amazing, and we will explore words with silent letters. 

Second grade whole classes will be seeing me this week to work on brainstorming an idea for a story in teams of three using one of the pictures from The Mystery of Harris Burdick. 

3PA will be reading The Green Book by Jill Patton Walsh all week.  Our focus will be on seeing the story through the eyes of the main character and looking for examples of change.

4PA will be reading a short story titled "The Power of Light" by Isaac Singer.  This story is set in Warsaw during World War II, following the challenges faced by two teens as they try to find hope in a dark time.  We will also read a novella set during the war titled The Mozart Question. The kids will be learning about the term juxtaposition and comparing the two stories. 

5PA will have our first Socratic Seminar of the year on the story "All Summer in a Day" on Monday.  The kids will also read two more short stories by Ray Bradbury, "The Rocket" and "A Sound of Thunder".  We will be exploring Bradbury's writing style and comparing the themes of the three stories we have read so far. 

PA and TD for the Week of 9-9

Kindergarten whole classes will see me on Wednesday and Friday to complete our reading of Ish by Peter Reynolds and create a secret project for their teacher to take home.  

First grade whole classes will be seeing me on Wednesday and Friday to create their own page for a class version of The Z Was Zapped.  The two classes last week did an outstanding job! 

Second grade whole classes will be coming to see me Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday this week to begin a project using Chris Van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.  I am excited to see what creative thinking comes from this reading and writing project. 

There will only be three days of PA this week.  Monday and Tuesday I will be administering one on one tests to our first graders and kindergarten students. 

3PA will learn about making generalizations to start the week off.  We will discuss valid and faulty generalizations and use this new learning as we begin our first novel of the year, The Green Book by Jill Patton Walsh.  This is a science fiction story about a group of people who leave Earth as refugees to find a new planet to live on and create a new world.  The kids will be journaling as the main character, imagining what the experience would be like from her perspective.

4PA will spend our time this week with a short story written by Bernard Ashley titled "Lenny's Red Letter Day." The kids will be reading with a purpose and annotating the text to develop our understanding of the motives characters have in the text.

5PA started to read Ray Bradbury's short story "All Summer in a Day" about a group of children living on Venus.  We will be reading this text and annotating it using several discussion questions as a guide for our first Socratic Seminar of the year.  

PA and TD for the Week of 9-3

Kindergarten whole classes will continue our author study on Peter Reynolds this week.  We will be reading Ish and Happy Dreamer.  I'll be asking the classes to look for things these two books have in common with The Dot which we explored last week. 

First grade whole classes will be coming to my room to create their own page for an alphabet book similar to the story we read last week, The Z Was Zapped. 

Second grade whole classes will be coming to my room to continue to read books by Chris Van Allsburg, specifically trying to find connective threads that run throughout all of the books we have read so far. 

3PA will discuss "Shells" by Cynthia Rylant, a short story we read last week.  The group will be focused on the different types of change that they found, and we will extract the theme of the text.  Groups will be creating webs based on the theme and answering a few complex questions about the story. 

4PA did a great job last week learning about different elements of literary analysis using the poem "Birdfoot's Grandpa."  This week, we will be reading a poem titled "Famous" to extend our understanding of literary analysis.  The kids will all complete a "SIFT" organizer for this poem: Symbols, Images, Figurative language,  and Tone and Theme.  By Friday, kids should be ready to write their own version of this poem. 

5PA did some great thinking using The Collector of Moments last week.  The group has a three paragraph writing assignment that they worked on in class, but finishing up is homework on Wednesday night.  It needs to be shared with me by the time PA starts on Thursday.  Kids will be working in small groups to create a color, symbol, and image that best capture the essence of the book.  On Friday, I will introduce the students to Ray Bradbury, an author we will be reading for several weeks.