Week 13

We began our last week of this unit learning about Anne Frank. While reading the Anne Frank RAZ Kid book in class, we practiced our close reading skills by underlining important details, circling dates, highlighting new-to-me words, and writing a brief note or memo in the margin about the given paragraph. The students' reading comprehension is drastically improving as they are implementing these strategies. Next week, we will use this reading strategy on a selection of fiction.

Throughout the week, the students made a mind map of their inquiry into Anne Frank and the Holocaust. Students explored the online Anne Frank House museum (Secret Annex) while some students wanted to investigate more into Malala, where they watched these videos: Malala videos.

Since YouTube is disabled on the student computers, I saved some videos for students, so they could learn a bit more and put a face and voice with whom we've read. Students continued recording their thoughts and reflections. This week, students invited a classmate to record with them as well.

This week was also "science week," so we took time to explore a few science experiments set up in the conference room. We also paused our own inquiry to teach Pre-K A about the damage oil spills have on the ocean. When deciding what experiment we would present, G5 students were inspired by their beach clean up and wanted to encourage the 4-year olds to clean up after themselves when they're on the beach or in nature, and since plastic toys are made from oil, G5 wanted to persuade the PreK students to limit the number of plastic toys they ask their moms and dads to buy. We even chanted "No More Plastic Toys!" We finished "science week" with a Science Fair, or as I called it a Summative Fair. G5 displayed their HUGE mind map of the BIG lessons and BIG thoughts they learned from all their weekly reflections. We also had a short video about being open-minded for students to watch.

This week we have come to the scheduled ending of our Sharing the Planet unit; however, we have some loose ends to tie up next week. We especially want to record another public service announcement (PSA) video or as we've come to call it, YouTube video, to spread the word to end discrimination and become more open-minded.