Well, it is official.  My kids think I am the best teacher on the planet. OK....that is a little exaggeration, BUT we did have a great time exploring colonial times and physical/chemical changes, while working on reading for evidence.  So, what did we do that put me on track to be voted into the hall of fame of teaching?  We made butter.  Yes, you heard me.  Making butter in class is the equivalent to winning the Super Bowl.  But I am ahead of myself.  Let me run you through the lessons so that you too can be the best thing since sliced bread. We are in crunch time before the big TEST, so reviewing all of our past science standards is a must.  Physical and Chemical changes is a big standard that is so hard for the kids to really grasp.  So we began our lesson by watching the StudyJams video on Physical and Chemical Changes.  We discussed and took notes, all the while jogging their memory to what they already knew.  Using the ......

Analyzing nonfiction text is something that we have been focusing on this year with the full implementation of CCSS.  I am always on the look out for new resources to help me with this, and when Zaner-Bloser contacted me to review their new "I Read to Write Kits", I jumped on the opportunity. Disclaimer:   Zaner-Bloser sent me a class set of these kits in exchange for an honest review.  Though they did send them to me, the thoughts on the program below are my own and not influenced in any way by this. The I Read to Write kits are consumable workbooks for the students to use to dive into text.  There are three units in the 5th grade level, one about Space Exploration, one about the American Revolution, and another about Sports that use math.  Each of the stories are highly engaging and very relevant to what my students are interested in (and what I am interested in as a teacher....hello American Revolution!!) I have been using these with my class to get......

We have been diving into nonfiction over the past few weeks with a unit on colonial America.  One of the key things we have been looking at are how various text structures contribute to the reader's overall understanding of the text. Each time we read a nonfiction text, whether it be in the social studies book or out of a trade book or periodical, we stopped for a second to acknowledge the text features and make note of what they were helping us, as a reader, understand. As a whole, the class decided that pictures with captions and headings were the most helpful in giving us information that we would make the text a bit clearer.  So, when the students were in the process of writing an informational article about one of the colonial regions, we decided to include those two text features. First, the students researched one of the three colonial regions found in the early days of English settlement.  They used multiple sources and created several prewriting organizer......

As adults, when we read nonfiction, we are reading for a purpose.  I pick up an article about the 13 colonies because I need to learn what the major settlements were for my lesson.  Or I find an article about what coarcation of the aorta is so that I am better prepared when I visit the cardiologist for treatment discussions.  I don't just pick up a nonfiction article to read for the fun of it.  I always have a purpose. It is the same in class.  When the students read nonfiction, there is generally a purpose (notice I said generally...I *know* there are exceptions to this....just go with me for the purposes of the is blog post ;))  So when we started out our exploration of nonfiction text, I started the students with a very simple lesson on reading with a purpose. First, we discussed some general guidelines for reading nonfiction text. Then, I gave them a simple article about the circulatory or respiratory systems.  Since that is our science top......

Getting to the main idea of expository text is so difficult for the students (heck, sometimes it is hard for teachers ;) )  We have been working on it for a better part of the year, mostly in a spiral way, so here we are again.  I really wanted the kids to internalize it this time, so we started with a very specific anchor chart. Then, I gave the students a nonfiction article (about the clothing worn by the middle class in the colonial era) and we looked at the text features of the article first. How did they help us to understand what the article was about? We wrote down our thoughts on what the main idea would be, based solely on the title, headings, and pictures. Then, we read paragraph by paragraph, annotating the main idea as we went.  We asked ourselves: What is this mostly about? What words are repeated? What details support one main point? Next, I asked the students to read one section of the article and think about the main idea of the entire sectio......

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......