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!
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! :)
