Journeys Lesson 11 - Jump / Black Athletes

Our Journeys Reading story for Lesson 11, Jump! From the Life of Michael Jordan by Floyd Cooper, required us to write a descriptive paragraph about our favorite athlete. I challenged students to write about an African American athlete for a few reasons.

1) The teacher-dork in me loves alliterative bulletin boards...have you noticed?
2) It will be perfect for our February bulletin boards.
3) February is Black History Month.
4) Michael Jordan is a black athlete.

Others who were in our guided reading books or Projectables. include:

• Tiger Woods
• Hank Aaron
• Wilma Rudolph
• Jackie Robinson 
• Roberto Clemente

Other black athletes we didn't read about but knew about:

• Lebron James (basketball)
• Muhammad Ali (boxing)
• Leila Ali (boxing)
• Dwayne Wade (basketball)
• Venus and Serena Williams (tennis)
• Dominique Dawes (gymnastics)
• Derek Jeter (baseball)
• Alex Rodriguez (baseball)
• Pele (soccer)
• Jackie Joyner-Kersee (track and field)
• Florence Griffith-Joyner (track and field)
• Althea Gibson (tennis)
• Lisa Leslie (basketball)
• Sheryl Swoopes (basketball)

Of course, I also allowed them to write about other athletes, who were also in our reading, especially ones such as:

• Michele Kwan,
• Jim Thorpe
• Babe Ruth
• Mia Hamm
• Nomar Garciaparra

We created this anchor chart to show what we learned when we analyze the author's craft in Jump.

One of my students found this book in our library:



If you'd like to do the project but don't have our reading program, check out these links!

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/340194-black-history-month-top-10-greatest-black-athletes

African American Athletes book

Google Search

The Science Fair

Our reading story for this week is called The Science Fair.  It's about a student who is very negative about his group's project, especially because his parnter seems to be able to explain things better than he can. It's great to teach scientific terms, but the lesson that the child learns is even better.

We created this anchor chart to show how the main character's feelings changed over time and to summarize the story.

Since my class hasn't taken a turn at displaying our work in the display case, I decided it would be a perfect time to have students complete their own science fair projects! Here are the project requirements (adapted from another source I can't find again!) Click to download the 5 page document.

Here's a header I used for my "Journeys into the Scientific Method" bulletin board...and the Scientific Method rap song!

 

If your students can't quite understand the scientific method or define what science is about, check out this book:

Check out my Create a Graph post to help you out with graphing data collected during the project.

I'll be posting some of my students' projects here, so check back and see them!

Reading Strategy - Monitoring and Clarifying

I did a mini-lesson on monitoring and clarifying this week. I was pleasantly surprised when with the strategies my students gave for our anchor chart. Check it out!

One of the other resources I use for this is Explode the Code. It especially helps students who make visual errors when attempting to read words because it makes them look at the whole word and each of the sounds in the word. It's more of a phonics-based program, but it also has comprehension as you get into higher levels. I really like how it helps with syllabication, and thus, fluency!

Here are some sample pages provided by School Specialty. Please note the copyright! View by clicking on ONE of the images - they all link the same pdf.