The Final Novel
Touching Spirit Bear
Touching Spirit Bear
This week we started reading the novel Touching Spirit Bear, which the students seem to be enjoying! This exciting novel is about a fifteen-year-old boy who has gotten himself in trouble. When given the choice between jail or banishment to a deserted island, he chooses to spend time along on the island. Throughout the novel, we will learn about how he got to this point and changes that he will need to make in order to get off of the island. Please ask your child what they think of the novel so far!
Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury is an interesting author who has written many different pieces. We divided the class into three sections and assigned each section a different Bradbury story to read within our Elements of Literature textbooks. After reading independently, the students met with who also read the same story as them to discuss what they thought while also answering questions. Next, we formed small groups that included a representative who read each story. It was awesome to see the students discuss how the three stories were similar while sharing "ah-ha" moments when they discovered similarities between the three different stories.
Creating a Sense of Era
This week we gave each student a penny that was dated anywhere from 2005-2015 and watched them look at us in confusion. After telling the students to take notice of the year on their pennies, we asked them to journal about any memory or memories that they remembered from that year. This led us to learning how to write a piece while creating a sense of era. Examples, graphic organizers, and "Pop Culture" Google searches were utilized over the past week in order to assist the students in writing a one paragraph piece based on that time frame. Finally, we had the students anonymously display their work as their classmates tried to guess which year the paragraph was based on.
What Scares You?
Cole Matthews, the main character in Touching Spirit Bear, faces many challenges. Throughout this unit, two of our main essential questions are, "How can literature help me understand more about myself?" and "What are the external and internal conflicts I face?" We addressed these a bit today when we introduced our first journal entry for this novel unit today. We asked our students to journal about what scares them. Due to privacy, we insured them that their journals would not be shared with their classmates, but instead they would be contributing one word to our graffiti board. In the picture you can see some of the fears that our students shared.
Choices, Choices, Choices
Who doesn't like choices? We have students who love poetry and we have students who cannot stand it, so we attempted to meet them in the middle towards the end of our poetry unit. Mrs. Paterna found a fantastic website that the students were able to use to find a poem that they wanted to annotate. We also included choice of the final unit test as we had a "Perfect 10" assessment. This included many choices, all ranging in point value, for students to choose from in order to total 10 points. Please ask your student about this test and what they thought of the silly poem that it included!
Event Information
Six Flags Trip
When?
Wednesday, Jun 3, 2015, 08:00 AM
Where?