End of the Year Book Clubs

 Last week, we started our end-of-the-year book clubs! 

In each group, we consolidated our learning from Readers Workshop and came up with plans on what to do in our book clubs with the goal to deepen our comprehension and of course, enjoy reading!

Within our book clubs, we are trying to mirror the type of book clubs adults have by keeping a flexible set-up and selecting activities to enhance our reading skills. 

We meet twice a week and decide what page to read up to for the next reading as well as how to prepare for the next reading. 

We have also come up with essential agreements for each group to make sure we are maintaining accountability. 

Below are our club names:

The Posca Donuts

The Traitors

Smile Banana

Our Book Club Display

Take a look at our book clubs in action!

Some of the groups have already finished their first book and are already starting their second book!

Happy Reading!

Discussion About George by Alex Gino

 Hello everyone!

In Grades 5 and 6, we are several weeks into our unit on Who We Are with the following Central Idea: 

Our sexuality and experiences during puberty help us understand ourselves and others. 

We started to explore the idea of gender identity and have been reading a book called George written by Alex Gino - a story about a girl who was born in a boy's body. In other words, the protagonist is transgender as her gender identity does not match her biological sex. 

To prepare for this book club meeting, we each came up with open-ended questions which we then narrowed down by voting on which questions would lead to deeper learning. 

Here are the questions we chose:

• Why did George keep the fact that she is a girl a secret?
• If George tells people that she wants to be a girl, then what might happen?
• How might the other characters react when they find out George is a girl?

We used some of the following sentence starters as tools to help us be effective communicators. 

We had a discussion that lasted over twenty minutes with minimal support from our teacher. 

Click below to take a look!

Bookshelves and Reader's Notebooks

 Boy, have we been reading a lot in Grades 5 and 6! 

In our "bookshelves", each book color represents a different genre.

You can see that many of us are challenging ourselves to read books in various genres!

In Readers' Workshop, we are almost finished our first unit on analyzing themes in interpretation book clubs. 

During this unit, we used our Reader's Notebooks in creative ways as a tool to develop our comprehension.

Take a look at some of the pages inside!

Stay safe in the typhoon, everyone!

Book Club: The Fourteenth Goldfish

This week, we resumed our weekly book club. 

We started to read a book called The Fourteenth Goldfish. 

It has a theme that relates to science which connects well to our current unit about extreme natural phenomena. 

We are working on building on other people's opinions to develop our understanding of the story by making connections, paraphrasing, and clarifying what we hear from others. 

This week, we came up with the following questions to discuss as a group:

• If your grandfather were the same age as you, how would you feel?
• 
  
• What’s wrong with Briana?
• 
  
• Why is the title called ”The Fourteenth Goldfish”?

Enjoy watching us grow as readers!

Finishing Jake Atlas

This week, we finished reading our first book for our weekly book clubs: 

Jake Atlas and the Tomb of the Emerald Snake.

We will take a bit of a break and then choose a different book to read after the spring holidays. 

Meanwhile, we found out that there is a sequel to the first book which is available from the school library! 

We are so excited to keep reading!

Book Club

Take a look at our fourth book club meeting!

Compared to our first meeting, we are becoming better at communicating effectively using the sentence stems as well as keeping the conversation going. 

This week's student-generated questions were the following: 

• If Jake hadn’t have blown up the tomb, what would have happened?

• Why was Jake’s mom the only one who had escaped from the evil cult?

To learn more about how the book clubs are run, please see the post from last week. 

Cheers!

Book Club / Generating Quality Questions and Tasks

This term, we started our weekly book clubs!

We have been learning about the importance of generating quality questions and tasks to help us learn. 

See the video below to find out about the different levels of questioning and thinking. 

 Here are some examples of the types of questions and tasks that can be generated at each level. 

In Grade 4, we are challenging ourselves to work with level 2 and 3 questions/task in our inquiries. 

Please note that questions around similar topics have been color-coded. 

During our book club, we had a discussion about the following student-generated questions as we read Jake Atlas and the Tomb of the Emerald Snake in connection to our inquiry into ancient civilisations: 

• Why doesn’t Pan like Mr. Kit?

• What would happen if the white-haired woman were part of the Cult of Osiris?

During the discussion, we try to be responsible and active communicators by using the sentence starters in the picture below as we reference the text. 

We keep track of the sentence starters we've used by moving them over to the left side.

Check out the video below to see our discussion in action!

Book Club

On Thursday, we had our weekly book club meeting. 

In order to prepare for our weekly conversations, we make sure to post "thick questions" on a shared Google Doc. On the following day, we select some of those questions for discussion. 

Here are the differences between "thick questions" and "thin questions". 

This week, we chose to discuss the following two questions:

• How would you feel if you were in a similar situation with your parents?
• Do you think there is something good going to happen in the next few chapters?

Here is actual footage of our meeting in action!

Have a wonderful day!