I am a sucker for inventive publishing.  I mean, who wouldn't love taking a 5 paragraph essay and writing the final draft in a cool and different way?  I do that all the time in my class.  So when it came to publishing this year's biography writing, I just couldn't let them write a simple essay and draw a picture.   Now, if you have followed along with my in the past, you know that I have creatively published this biography before.  I LOVE doing these Hanger People biographies but I felt like this year, since we are so into Google Slides and using our chrome books (which I have a class set of thanks to DonorsChoose.org !)  we could take these biographies in a different direction.  So instead of the hanger people this year, we created magazines. To begin, we of course started with the writing.  Being 5th graders, I knew that if I just told them to write a biography, they would be lost.  So instead, I helped to scaffold the writing for......

                        I like to teach history, that is no secret (if you have followed along on this blog at all you probably know that ;) ) But I have really come to love teaching different perspectives of historical events.  I think it is so great to give the students primary documents and other sources of information from an historical event and have them determine who was right, wrong, or otherwise. I like when they are able to make up their minds rather than have me tell them "the right answer" and perspective.   Such was the case in this lesson I did about the idea of Britain taxing the American colonists in the 1760s and 1770s. We learned about the taxes that were imposed upon the American colonies (the Stamp Act, the Sugar Act, the Townshend Acts) like we have in the past.  We read about them.  We watched videos.  Nothing too out of the ordinary.  We also learned about the Boston Mass......

We have been working a lot with bias and point of view when discussing historical events, so when it was time to teach about the Boston Tea Party, I kept with that same theme.   I started with the students by reading a nonfiction passage from Readworks about the Tea Party.  As always, we began by noting the purpose of our reading (To find FACTUAL information about what happened during the Boston Tea Party) and then started underlining any evidence that fell under our purpose.  The students answered the open-ended response questions using the RACE strategy we have been working with. We next watched the Liberty's Kids - The Complete Series pilot episode (this is my affiliate link) which happens to be about the night of the Boston Tea Party.  I asked the kids to take notes on the facts that they saw in the episode and the opinions that were presented, including any bias that was presented (we had previously learned about that here .)  On a side note, if......

One thing I really love about teaching history is that I am able to get the students to look more critically and deeply into the events of our past and realize that there truly are many different sides to the same story. We did that this past week with the Boston Massacre.   We began with a discussion on what facts, opinion, and bias are.  We talked about how each of those things are different, yet present when we discuss historical events.  Focusing in on bias in particular, we examined how it can play a huge role in the way information is presented. I gave the students two different articles about the night in question (matching our standard of looking at two viewpoints on the same event).  One was from the Boston  Gazette    and the other from the London Chronicle .  In pairs and using three different colored pencils, the students read the articles, underlining evidence of fact, opinion, or bias (or, in some cases, adding multiple......

While we were watching an episode of Liberty's Kids - The Complete Series (which, incidentally, my kids love with all their collective hearts) it mentioned how the mail was being intercepted during the Revolutionary War by both sides and that coding and other techniques were necessary in order to keep sensitive war communications secret.  The kids seemed really intrigued by the idea that Ben Franklin used invisible ink, so I ran with it. First, I had the kids read this information article I found about the various spy techniques that both the British and the Americans were using during the Revolution.  We wrote our purpose (finding information about the different ways people sent coded messages) and then began annotating the article.  After a good first read (lead by me), then a second read in partners where the students wrote their own ideas about each technique, I had them summarize 3 of the most intriguing techniques, with evidence from the text in their summary......

About 15 year ago, I went to this awesome art show we have in my area called the Pageant of the Masters.  Basically, people come together, get all painted up, and transform themselves into actual famous paintings.  They stand still, altogether, and you literally can not tell that it is a bunch of people standing on the stage instead of the actual artwork itself.  It truly is amazing. Thank you Ladybug's Teacher Files for this awesome button! I have always wanted to do something like that in my own classroom and this year, I just went for it. I collaborated with Susie, The Panicked Teacher on this one too....so we both did the same lesson, without our own little twists.  Here is how it turned out in my room. (then head over to her blog to see how hers turned out) We have been focused a lot on historical artifacts and their accuracy as far as actual history goes (see our lesson on Paul Revere here.)  So for this lesson, I chose three paintings about th......

Let me preface this post by saying that what we did here in this lesson is HARD.  There is no way around it.  It was just hard.  But, that didn't stop the kids from not only learning the intended objectives, but really learning it well.  I am so ecstatically over the moon about the outcomes in this lesson, that I am practically bursting at the seams here! So what is this hard lesson, you ask?  The midnight ride of Paul Revere. Paul Revere is an American legend.  He is one of the first "super heroes" born out of our quest for independence and freedom from England.  But the inherent nature of being a legendary superhero is that much of the story we love and cherish are, in actuality, myths. Myths?  Paul Revere?  WHAT??? As I approached this idea with the students, they honestly had no idea what I was talking about.  Paul Revere is the guy who rode in at midnight, alone, screaming "The British are coming!  The British are comin......

This past few weeks we have been working on summarizing non-fiction text.  Looking at the various traits of non-fiction and figuring out how they all work together to get the point of the text across has been very tricky for the kids.  So to help them figure out what the most important information in a non-fiction text is, I employed the help of a bit of creative expression and technology. Our current project in Computer Lab (which I am very much aware of how amazingly lucky we are to have a lab at all) is using the program called Comic Life.  This is a program where the kids create a comic strip all on the computer.  It is a cute program that I thought would tie in perfectly with our summarizing non-fiction text study. Comics, in and of themselves, are short visual ways to get across a huge message.  That is basically what a summary does.  It takes a lot of information and condenses it down to only the things that are absolutely necessary to get th......