Author's Point of View - ELA Lesson Plans #14

 How many more weeks do you have before winter break? We have two glorious weeks before we get off for the holidays.  Getting through to the end just may be the biggest test of my teaching skills yet.  This week will be all about thematic days.  Tuesday -Friday I will throw in food to help motivate my students to keep on learning .  We'll have a Cookie Day, Hot Cocoa Day, Candy Cane Day and a Gingerbread Day.  Monday is set aside for fruitcake, but we won't have any food because I spent the weekend loving on my family and not shopping for my class.  Each day we will also have a fun holiday read aloud, Grinch Reader's Theatre fluency time and Grinch sing alongs.  We will perform the reader's theatre, song and various poems at our holiday party.  Writing will look the same as last week, but we'll be writing about holidays around the world.  We are keeping the same format because otherwise kid's attention span wanes and we lose learning time.  Using a high interest topic coupled with a familiar format will keep the kids learning to the end or as long as I can possibly get them to.

We'll also be planting our traditional Candy Seeds.  You can find the seed pack and activities in my Peppermint Day unit by clicking on the picture below.

You can find my lesson plan page outlines from A Modern Teacher.

Cultures From Around The World - ELA Lesson Plans #12

Here we are in week two of one of the best units EVER! The students are having a great time learning about cultures from around the world, how those cultures affect us, all while incorporating reading, writing and social studies standards together.  This week will not disappoint! All teachers know that learning just before a break can leave students a little less motivated, distracted and it may feel a bit like herding cats.  This is why I up the engagement of my lessons so that students keep on going until the minute they leave on Friday.

We will be diving into comparing and contrasting again on Monday.  The students will have a host of H.O.T questions to guide their thinking.  On Wednesday we will take a break a break during shared reading from cultures and dive into Thanksgiving.  We do not learn about a sugar coated Thanksgiving, rather we learn an age appropriate approximation of the events.  Students will look at the cause/effect relationships between these events in order to connect each event through a timeline.  Students have been discussing and learning about an author's point for weeks now, Thursday will have them reading three passages, determining the purpose and finding evidence to support the different points.

So much going on this week that every minute counts.  Our shared reading lessons will run between 20-30 minutes.  We will have fun read alouds ever day.  (I'll list some of them below for you.). We will also be incorporating fall fun into our guided reading.  Students will continue to write their Sweden pieces to display for their culture fair.  If you are interested in details to any of the extra events that I have listed, please look for links below.  You can find my lesson plan outlines from A Modern Teacher here.

Click below to see what a culture fair is and how to run one.

Here are my read alouds for the week.

Need a freebie for bellwork? Click on the picture below.  Check out last week's lessons for a couple other freebies for a culture fair.

Click below for some of the materials that I'm using this week.

Author's Purpose - ELA Lesson Plans #9

 Boy is this week going to be fun!!! We are going to take some very difficult standards or level 3 cognitive difficulty standards to be exact  and turn them into a week of hands on engagement.  This week will also kick off a week and a half of monsters, bats and spiders!!!!  Our ultimate goal is to have students understand strategies that will help them to identify the main purpose of a text, including what the author wants to explain.  In order to do this, we will start the week off with a quick fact and opinion lesson.  The students will work as a whole class to sort fact and opinion about a lovable green monster named Harry.  Once they have the hang of it they will work in small groups to synthesize the information and write their own facts and opinions about another lovable monster named Sally (Harry and Sally! lol) The class will come together to wrap up the lesson with a little information about how author's use information and their opinions to write pieces.  The next day will be a tiny detour from monster fun to read a piece on dental health.  While it doesn't stick with the theme, it does a great job of guiding students through the whole standard with a purposeful text and aligned questions.  Don't worry, you'll read below that students will spend time in writing doing awesome monster activities!  We'll finish off the week with bats and spiders.  The students will have to independently show that they understand the standard by writing and opinion piece and explaining it's purpose.

Just for reference, if you don't know I use the letter t for teacher and ss for students in my outlines.  Also, you can get the lesson plan templates that I use from A Modern Teacher.

We are going to read the mentor text How To Catch A Monster on youtube this week.  The students will be working on the writing crafts of vivid verbs and adjectives while writing a narrative.  We'll kick the week off by having the students write a very detailed description of their monster with adjectives.  Each student will then get a neighbor's description where they will have to draw the monster to an exact specification.  The author will use the drawing to make revisions to their piece the next day and the drawing will happen a second time.  Once all of the students have their monster descriptions written, they will write a narrative on how to catch the monster using vivid verbs.  The students will have to have their pieces written and edited by Thursday.  Everyone will take part in an author's share where they will present their piece to their friends.  The best part is that they will have a drawing and a writing piece to hang up for all to see!

 Students who get finished early will be allowed to make a 2 minute bat or spider craft to put on their opinion writing.  Click below to see how easy it is.

If you would go to the first of the lesson outline series click here.

To find this week's resources click below.