Here's to another Peek at the Week with Mrs. Laffin!
1) I have a celebration from last week that I would like to share before I start with this week's activities. If you read last week's post you know that I tried the first signpost from the book "Notice and Note". Well I have to say that it was a total success in my class. Students were find the contrasts and contradictions in the excerpts I gave them like pros. Then when they asked themselves the anchor question "Why is the character acting this way?" they made wonderful inferences about the character! Go Mrs. Shepherd's Class! :)
2) We will be begin to learn about character traits and how to analyze the character this week. I have chosen to use the book "Black Cowboy, Wild Horses" by Julius Lester. This book is about a man named Bob Lemmons and he is "famous for his ability to track wild horses. He rides his horse, Warrior, picks up the trail of mustangs, then runs with them day and night until they accept his presence"(Scholastic). It has a great story line, examples of splendid figurative language, excellent sentence structure, and beautiful pictures. We are going to use the text to analyze the character. Students will create a T-Chart in their reader's notebook. On one side they will put the text and on the other they will write the character trait they inferred from the text. In addition to using this for reading, I am also going to use this book during writer's workshop. I plan on taking one of the sentences from the book and using it as a mentor sentence. I am going to model my lesson after the ladies over at Dandelions and Dragonflies. When I read about mentor sentences I knew it was something that I wanted to try.
3)The last plan for the week is to recover from this awful cold I've had all last week and to get all my graduate school readings done!!!!
Thanks for stopping by! I do love comments and new followers! :)
~Susan
Hi Susan,
ReplyDeleteI just taught a lesson on character traits that the kids really loved. We watched the "Caine's Arcade" video and give three character traits to describe Caine and support their thinking with evidence from the video. If you haven't seen the video, I highly recommend it. Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faIFNkdq96U
Thank you for always leaving such nice comments on my blog. I would reply to you, but you are a "no reply blogger", which means I can't see your email address. You can visit www.ideasbyjivey.blogspot.com and click on "Techy Tips" if you want to fix that. :)
Jennifer
Mrs. Laffin's Laughings
Thanks for the video for character traits! I just might have to add that to my plans for the week:)
ReplyDeleteAlso I fixed my no reply problem. Thanks for pointing that out for me!!