First Day 2013--Welcome Back!

Today, we took a look at the six traits of writing: voice, word fluency, organization, word choice, ideas, and conventions. I wrote a list of sentences about myself and Language Arts class, and groups of students tried to organize the sentences into a coherent paragraph. Now, it is their turn: Students will write about themselves, organizing their thoughts into a meaningful paragraph, with attention to the six traits of good writing. Tomorrow, we will take a gallery walk and read about each other, evaluating the papers based on the traits. I look forward to reading about everyone and hearing each student's unique voice.

Poems in Two Voices

The sixth-grade Language Arts students wrote and performed poems in two voices concerning a moment that we had discussed related to civil rights and the Civil Rights Movement. Here, two students perform a poem concerning two different perspectives of people who experienced segregation.




Another group performed a poem in two voices concerning the murder of Emmett Till, here:

Time lines for Civil Rights Movement Unit

This is a sample time line created for the Civil Rights Movement unit in Language Arts 6. Students completed these using Dipity, Capzles, Timetoast, and XTimeline, or they completed them by hand.

This time line concerns the events that transpired in the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till:



This time line covers the life and activities of Ruby Bridges as they relate to her integration of the William Frantz Public School in New Orleans, LA:

Ruby Bridges Timeline on Dipity.

The March on Washington

In sixth-grade Language Arts, we studied the Civil Rights Movement and Freedom's Children by Ellen Levine. Students researched various topics, gathered photos, and wrote a script related to a particular topic related to the group's area of expertise. Then, they recorded a vodcast about their event and documented their resources on a bibliography for each group member. Here is a vodcast about the March on Washington:

Birmingham Church Bombing

This vodcast by Natalie, Andrew, Jasmine, and Austin shares their findings on the Birmingham Church bombing after many days of research, script writing, and practice.  Each of the students also completed a bibliography for the resources used.

Acting our Ages by Showing not Telling

Trying to write with vivid verbs and descriptive nouns can be difficult. How can we visualize what we write? The fifth-graders took on this challenge recently by trying to modify the sentence, "The person walked and talked." Changing the bold-faced words in this sentence to more vivid synonyms and variations, the kids wrote new sentences, trying to think of words that their peers could picture and act out. Then, we paraded around the room using the verbs the kids substituted for the word "walked." We pranced, skipped, hopped, crawled, and even wormed. Following this warm-up, the students took turns acting out the sentences they had written, giving classmates a chance to guess the sentence. Check out this video of someone acting out "The hippie jigged and whistled."

Kicking it into Gear on A Day Advisories

Advisory kicked into gear during the first couple of weeks of school with our first intra-advisory kickball game. The Sutton Slightnings took on Mrs. Corrigan's group in the first match of the year, tying 3-3 after two complete innings. The Slightnings scored three additional runs in the top of the third but called the match a draw when the Corrigan crew ran out of time to take a turn at the plate. Other advisory groups played in a Balderdash tournament and in games in the gym. Stay tuned for continued updates on A-Day advisory activities and standings.