Teach Dailey

My students have been reading Scholastic Magazine and then responding through dialogue and writing. We choose a quote from the text and then we figure out what it is trying to say. This fits with the Common Core and has been successful. When we started writing opinion piece essays last week, we were able to look back at this poster (above) that we made to remind us how we return to the text to prove our position through quotes. Scholastic Magazine has proven to be an excellent source for school appropriate news stories. This week we learned about Malala Yousafzai and with the Scholastic Magazine came a giant poster with a map of the world. On it was marked which countries had the most children. The students loved this, and it was a fun way to talk about why education rights is such an important issue. My resident teacher is so amazing, and I am grateful she showed me the Scholastic Magazine and website. The website for Scholastic has 1 minute videos that can introduce a topic and Jeo...

As the 5th grade students are continuing their research on their chosen states for social studies, they are finishing up a very special project for writing time. I asked the students to write a letter to the Governor of their state that tells of two things they learned about the state, and one question for the Governor. This lesson that accompanied this assignment showed students how important mail has been through history. They saw letter examples from the Civil War, the Tower of London (1500s), and from President Obama. We talked about how the current letter may be seen in many forms, including text messages or e-mails, but students agreed that there is just something special about having something tangible, that is carried from great distances. The students were so excited to know that their final drafts would actually be mailed. This picture shows the mailbox I made, where students can deposit their letters. Soon they will finish their final drafts, complete the envelope, and put...

 Students have been writing poetry using personification of fall and doing close readings of Scholastic magazines this month. The magazines provide a fun entry point to get students to start thinking about referring to the text to cite their source or back up an opinion. So far my favorite discussion has been about sharks. Students looked at the picture on the cover that showed a great white shark leaping from the water with its mouth wide open and wrote about what they saw. Then after reading the article about how conservationist are working to protect sharks they reflected on how the cover image was related to the text. The final step for this assignment was to explain a quote from the text that spoke to moving the idea of sharks from fear to fascination. This fits with the 5th grade common core goals and is very engaging in the classroom.                                        ...