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?