Referring back to the text doesn't have to be scary! Happy Halloween!

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 Jeopardy style games to check for comprehension after reading the magazine.
My friend had a birthday this week so I made her some paper flowers. The vase is repurposed from a bubble bath container that I wrapped in washi tape, and the signs are made from scrapbook paper attached with rubber cement. When the class was reading the book The Doll People I brought in some paper flowers I had made and they loved them! They couldn't believe that something like that could be made by hand. It was really fun to expose them so some simple crafting that I do for fun on the weekends. I'll have to think about how I could do a lesson to teach the students to make paper flowers. They enjoyed listening to this book as a read aloud to start the year. The Doll People opened up the conversation about diversity. There are two doll families in the story that are very different by appearance. I would recommend this book for the classroom and again I am so grateful that my resident teacher introduced me to it!

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