Black History Month: Compare and Contrast MLK and Nelson Mandela

In honor of Black History Month and reading My Brother Martin and Me by Christine King Farris (Martin's sister) in our fourth grade Journeys book, we decided to compare and contrast Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela. 

My class is a 1:1 Chromebook class, so we did this assignment together as a class on Google Docs. 

If you purchase this item on TPT, you can easily copy and paste from the PDF into Google Docs.

If you haven't used Google Docs as a class, I suggest going over a procedure for erasure. If someone accidentally deletes the graphic organizer, we all stop immediately and take hands off the keyboards until the mistake can be fixed by the person who deleted or until the previous version can be restored.

The great thing about this lesson is that I have adapted it for you so that it can be used in whole or in parts, independently or in small or whole groups. This would even be great if you homeschool! Rubrics are included for different expectations. You also don't have to search for resources to make sure they are appropriate since I've included links for you!

See more pages and download this resource in my TPT store.

We also watched his I Have a Dream speech 

and made this beautiful dove bulletin board. 

Students wrote ways they will and already do use peaceful, powerful words.

Who else would you like to see included in another compare and contrast project?

Black History Month: The Harlem Renaissance

My students and I just read Me and Uncle Romie by Claire Hartfield in our Journeys book. It's a fictional story written from the first-person point-of-view of James, who was a nephew of real-life deceased artist Romare Bearden.

 They almost immediately recognized the illustrations as being familiar because we recently finished reading a poetry book called My Man Blue from our Making Meaning / Collaborative Literacy Pilot. Both books were illustrated by Jerome Lagarrigue.

These books were perfect for lightly touching upon segregation and discrimination while teaching kids about friendship, family, and life in New York City / Harlem. 

Click here or on the image above to download my character trait inferencing form.

I also paired Me and Uncle Romie with Students made text-to-text connections with My Hands Sing the Blues: Romare Bearden's Childhood Journey, which is written as a form of poetry like My Man Blue.

Check out some of Romare's artwork on the Romare Bearden Foundation website. Make sure to preview images of his art before showing students! One neat project we didn't get to do just yet was collage art. Hopefully we will have some time soon!

Oliver K. Woodman Letter Writing Project

In third grade, we read The Journey of Oliver K. Woodman by Darcy Pattison.

A fun extension we did was to write letters to friends and family across the U.S., North America, and all around the world. We asked them to send us a letter or email back tell us what they did with Oliver.

 https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Oliver-K-Woodman-Letter-Writing-Project-4401747

We posted mini Olivers on a map with their location so that we could learn more about geography and landmarks.

It was a blast! If you want to join in, here is a link to our letter as well as a map and printable Oliver you can mail out to others.

Here are some other cool resources we used to track Oliver's journey in the book, plus a neat video of the book in case you don't have it.

Check out my other Oliver K. Woodman post!

Get Your Kicks on Route 66

I know that I love a good road trip now and then, but one thing I haven't done is take a trip on Route 66. To me, it has always symbolized a new found freedom Americans felt and an overall feeling of happiness once the Great Depression and World War II subsided. More Americans were able to afford cars and to travel. One of our guided reading groups recently read a book titled, "Route 66" and wanted more information. I found this great website that ties in facts and pictures of the road's attractions with fitness.  It's called www.PaceTrek.com and my students just loved it!

I especially recommend the slideshow that plays the song "Get Your Kicks on Route 66" along with pictures from the famous road.

Younger kids may recognize Route 66 from the Disney Movie Cars. You can get more information to read, download and print coloring pages, and watch videos at this Interstate Highway Project Resources Page.

Emily Priddy has created a great free guidebook to Route 66 for kids that you can download for free! Just click on the image below.

You can also download a free Route 66 worksheet by clicking on the image.

Just remember...life is a highway!

The Journey of Oliver K. Woodman

This week's reading story is called The Journey of Oliver K. Woodman. It's an adorable book about an uncle and his niece who write letters to each other. Uncle Ray lives in South Carolina and works in his wood shop. He can't take time off work to visit his niece Tameka in California, so he creates Oliver K. Woodman, a wooden statue he hopes people will take along on their trips across the US. He puts a letter in Oliver's backpack and makes him a wooden sign that says, "California or Bust!" The book's pages are a mixture of letters between Uncle Ray and Tameka as well as letters from travelers explaining their stories and Oliver's journey to Uncle Ray. As we read the book, we tracked Oliver across the country.

It also has a sequel called Searching for Oliver K. Woodman. Our friend Oliver has gone missing, so Uncle Ray sends his friend Imogene Poplar, a private detective, out to find him. It's a fun story with great little geographical tidbits. I can't wait to read it to the kids!

This book reminded me of Flat Stanley. It's a perfect time to start our Flat Stanley project! If you and your family or class is interested in receiving Flat Stanley from us, leave a message below and / or send me an email at AlysiaBattista@yahoo.com!

The Journey: Stories of Migration

This week's book, The Journey: Stories of Migration, compares migration of locusts and whales. While the excerpt in our book doesn't cover butterflies, we learn about them in science class. I am about to send away for our larvae so that we can begin to study their life cycle after spring break! We will be using the Journey North website.

If you are looking for companion books, check out The Story of Three Whales. It's a story we used to read when I used Open Court for second grade.

 It is about three whales who, in an unusually warm winter, missed the signs that winter was coming (probably due to global warming) and it was necessary to migrate south to a warmer climate. They got trapped in ice, and by some miracle, two whales survived after some human intervention and help from an ice breaking ship.

We watched this whale echolocation video to learn more about how whales communicate and find a sense of direction on their long journey.

We also learned about locust plagues. BBC created this great video about The Plagues of Locusts in Africa.

Two Bad Ants

This week's reading story is Two Bad Ants by Chris VanAllsburg. He also wrote and illustrated (The Polar Express and Jumanji.) It's perfect because it's almost picnic time! It's a neat story because it's written from the perspective of the ants and it requires students to use picture clues and descriptions in the text to make inferences about what is happening to the ants. For example, they mention being on some round, brown thing (a bagel) and suddenly being put into something with a red, glowing heat (toaster). The kids really got a kick out of it!

The ants in this story aren't fire ants, but I pinned the most adorable idea from the Pinterest Board of Hope King (at Shenanigans in Second). I can't wait to do my April bulletin board now! If I could find the original post, I'd share it. For now, click the picture to go to the pin.

My kids told me they made a connection to the movies Antz,  The Ant Bully, and A Bug's Life. I wouldn't know because I've never any of them!

 

Here are the trailers:

Antz

A Bug's Life

The Ant Bully

It kind of makes me think of Honey I Shrunk the Kids! Remember the scene where the kids ride the fire ants? You can actually watch the whole movie for free here!



Life on the Ice

It feels like such a downer to be reading a story about the Arctic and Antarctic when we are embarking on spring...but alas, we can't skip stories in our reading book! Life on the Ice talks about the reasons why scientists go to the North and South Poles, what they see and do, and why their jobs are important for Earth. We just finished up a weather unit a while ago, so the kids had a lot of background knowledge on climate change.

I found some amazing resources at the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears site at Ohio State University.

A few of my students had a hard time keeping the Arctic and Antarctic regions straight. This nifty little foldable and other resources helped a lot! It had a list of great books to read on the subject too!

Faces of (Arctic) Climate Change Video

Video on Arctic Climate Change

Disappearing Sea Ice Video

See other Journeys posts here.

The True Story of the Three Little Pigs

This week's Journeys reading story, Dogzilla, had a journal prompt that asked the kids to rewrite the story from the dog's point of view. They had no idea what that meant until I pulled out an oldie but a goodie...

The Three Little Pigs - wolf style! John Scieszka wrote The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. Albert Wolf tries persuade the jury that he should be freed from jail because the reason he ate the pigs was a big misunderstanding... so this story was also fabulous because we're working on persuasive writing and cause/effect! While it's humorous non-fiction, he prefers to call it a fractured fairytale.

My students thought it was pretty funny, and immediately knew how they would turn Dogzilla into a first-person narrative from the dog's point of view.

Other books of the same type include:

The Three Pigs

and 

Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig

For more activities for The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs, click here or here.

For more Journeys posts, click here.

Dogzilla

This week's reading story is called Dogzilla. 

It's a humorous revision of Godzilla, but with a dog and mice as its main characters. Author and illustrator Dav Pilkey's site gave us more information about his inspiration for writing. He likes to take pictures of his pets, then cut and glue them to backgrounds he has painted. They become the pages of his books! He even posted some of the pages of this book on his website!

He also has some fun animal puzzles for you to do!

Check out the Eduplace website for Dogzilla here.

For other Journeys posts, click here.