Week 3

Week of 9/18

This week we learned about refugees from the book The Journey. We inquired into the questions: Who are they? What do they want? Where are they? Students selected a country and researched whether refugees are admitted into those countries and how many. We will continue our investigation next week.

Also this week, students selected a picture book in the class library, read it, and explored how it connects to our central idea. How did the person’s journey change his/her life? What caused the person’s life to change? How do we know the person’s life changed? Students looked for evidence in the book to support their answers.  

In English we are still working on vivid descriptions; however, due to our reading of The Journey, we became intrigued by the illustrations and their possible meanings. This created a natural opportunity to discuss implied meaning through the use of the book’s illustrations. First we analyzed the artistic choices by the author-illustrator: color, shapes, shades, shadows, movement, lines, perspective, etc. At first we found examples of these artistic choices on the pages of the book, and later we began naturally analyzing their meaning. Why is the sea black? Why did the illustrator choose to use orange and red tones and dark grays and black? Why are the children looking up, but the mom’s eyes are looking forward? Why are all the birds different?

Week 2

Week of 9/10

For English, we are continuing our discovery into vivid, descriptive language. Students
randomly selected a straightforward sentence and added vivid descriptions. The following
day students shared their examples with their group and they worked together to add as
many descriptions as possible. What does it look like? What does it sound like?

Students then turned these ideas into a paragraph of approximately 75 words. This was a
huge undertaking, and we are still working through the writing process to improve these
paragraphs.

For our unit of inquiry, students worked on creating questions for us to inquire into for this
unit. They created dozens of questions and we are working on narrowing those down into
the essential big questions for our unit.

Using the central idea as our guide, students decided which group ALL the books in our
class could be filed into as it relates to the central idea. Believe it or not, the students
decided ALL books in the classroom can be filed under the “yes” pile, as they all have
lessons to teach us.

The "yes" pile

Students selected any 3 books in the classroom. Read the book and wrote a brief
explanation of how the book connects to our unit.

Student-selected books

Chalk Talk: This is visible thinking strategy where students have a discussion with
each other using only their pencils. They are not allowed to literally talk during this
discussion.
All Chalk Talk questions came from the student-created questions earlier in the week.
This visible thinking routine proved to be a great tool to give all students time and
opportunity to have their voices heard during a discussion.

Students used their “form” questions to make a list of people and discoveries in
which they would like to inquire MORE into throughout the unit. Ms. Chiya took
the students to the library for Japanese class this day. The students were able
to locate books on their interests from their “form” lists.

Later in the week, the students had a brainstorming session of all possible
reflection questions for our unit.

...and sometimes we Tweet at the author and illustrator of a book to pass along our
thoughts or questions.

...and sometimes they Tweet back! 

Week 1: Term 2

Welcome back, G5 Students and Parents!

For our first week we began our new theme: Where We Are in Time and Place.  The students worked to understand the trasndisciplinary theme: 

Using the transdisciplinary theme and our "assigned colors," the students brainstormed what our central idea could possibly be. 

Students made observations such as: 

"A journey is when a person travels, and a person can learn something when they travel". 

"People's lives are journeys" 

"If you journey to a place, you can learn from it." 

"If peoples' lives are hard, they can learn from that."

"When people travel, they can see something new and learn from it." 

"We can learn from everything in the world!" 

Here's our class central idea compared to the "adult-created" one: