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!

Theme-based Literary Essays

In Grades 5 and 6, we have been inquiring into how to write convincing literary essays. 

Here are some of the techniques we learned during this writing unit. 

 Take a look at our finished essays!

 

 

Have a fantastic weekend!

Published Poems with Illustrations

In Grades 5 and 6, we have been developing our writing skills as poets. 

We each picked a poem from our collection of drafts that we were the proudest to publish for others to read.

Many of us wrote using extended metaphors throughout the entire poem to describe external or internal conflicts. 

Enjoy reading the poems along with the accompanying beautiful illustrations!

Have a great weekend!

Personal Narrative Writing

In Grades 5 and 6, we have been working on a personal narrative writing unit. 

As authors, we increased our self-management skills as we worked through the writing process of planning, drafting, revising, editing and publishing. 

This week, we had a book celebration to proudly share our books with our classmates. 

You can also see the students reading their books out loud on Seesaw Blog. 

Below, we are posting the cover and first page of each book. 

Our books are displayed on the first floor in the entrance area!

Author: Jose

Author: Tina

Author: Markus

Author: Brandon

Author: Nanoka

Author: Claire

Author: Tomoharu

Author: Suguri

Author: Hirohito

In the posters below, you can also see some of the strategies and techniques we learned during this unit. 

Have a great weekend!

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!