Hey, we know that!

We have Guided Reading groups with 4th, 5th, and 6th grades, and we love them! With my 5th graders, we are reading a young adult version of Benjamin Franklin's biography. Our vocab word yesterday was apprentice.

I'm also in their social studies class. Their textbook vocab word today? Apprentice! On the same page as the word was a mini bio on Ben Franklin, and on the next page was a photo of candle-making, which Ben helped his dad with as a child!

I look around the classroom during social studies to see if any of my students make the connection. They do! Diego makes a signal to Alejandro, who then turns around and points to me. I look at Hector who is smiling at the other two boys. They were so excited to already know what the class was just discussing! How cool!

Spanglish

We're writing bilingual books with our 3rd and 4th graders. We've talked about several different ways to write bilingually and even gave a couple examples of mixed language books, where some sentences contain Spanish and English--Spanglish!

One 3rd grader loved the idea so much that he wrote this poem on his own in our afterschool club (our topic is Culture and Cooking, so his poem is about food, namely, chocolate). It's attached. I asked him to read it out loud for me. Just so you know, he says chocolate the Spanish way for this poem, not the English way. Enjoy! :)

The Friendly Letter Song

And we have video!

Two little letters can make all the difference! :)

The Friendly Letter Song

Karyn Brumbaugh rewrote the Miley Cyrus song: "Party in the USA." (Click the link for the karaoke version of the song; that's what we sang to!) We actually made a music video to it, as a culminating event for writing friendly letters. I'm still working on getting permission to put the video up, so here's the audio version. Enjoy!


"The Friendly Letter Song"

I thought to myself just yesterday
I really miss my best pal
See, she lives far away in another town
And her name is Sal
I wanna do something totally awesome
Too bad I just can't mail an opossum
I know that sounds crazy
I'm not trying to be lazy
All of a sudden I get a great idea
And I remember Miss Rudolph
Teaching all of us in the ESL
A letter writing song
A letter writing song
A letter writing song

So we throw our heading up
And write their name
Juan, Lili, or Jose
And then we put our intro in
And that's where we say hey
Then we have the body
Where we write questions
And hope answers come our way
Then closing, like saying bye
And then we sign our names
Yeah, and then we sign our names!

Poem for Two Voices

Went to the Intesol Conference in Indy this weekend. Was phenomenal! Best one I've been to yet! One great activity that we did was in Katie Brooks and Maggie Robillard's presentation--we wrote a poem for two voices. While I'm an avid poem writer, I've not yet tried this type. I worked with two inspirational writers/teachers; here's what we came up with:

Social Studies Class

by Denise Anderson, Ana Arroyo (both IPS School 15), and Sarah Steele

I sit every day                                    I stand every day

listening                                                talking

                                                                 About American ideals

About America's ideas

                                                                 The Founding Fathers

They found padres?

I'm lost                                                  My students are lost

Here we go again                               Let's try again

I have a question                              Shh!

                                                                 We have to get through this lesson

But, but who are the padres?      THE   F OU N D ING  FAA THERS

But                                                          You're interrupting

Stop!                                                       Stop!

3rd Grade Has a Love of Reading!

Our 3rd graders have been practicing their fluency, expression, and voice with one book-of-choice this whole week. Today was the culminating event. They read their book to a captive audience (one to two partners). We had laughter, magnificent reading, and beautiful smiles all around!