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!

Winter Cinquain Poems

Every year, I feel the time crunch between Thanksgiving break and December winter break. This fun poem writing activity helps us practice poem writing and parts of speech. Plus, it's fun to color and stick up on a bulletin board!

Students get to pick a Google Slide and then they type their poem in the text box. It's easy to print all of them because they are all in one presentation. No one has deleted anyone else's slide, but it's a pretty easy fix if they do because I keep a master copy and then share an editable one with them in Google Classroom / Drive.

Before doing this writing assignment, we practice the Eight Parts of Speech song, which comes from Scholastic's Memory-Boosting Mnemonic Songs. 

Here are a couple of slides from the Google Slides presentation I created to go along with the song.

Find the editable poem presentation in my TPT store here. 

This 30 slide PowerPoint presentation includes 28 editable fill-in-the-blank poem pages with directions an examples. You will also get a link to the editable Google Slides presentation. These poems look great as a bulletin board. Just print, color, cut, and glue onto construction paper!

Been There, Read and Scene That!

Thanks for visiting today to share in our special news! Our DonorsChoose.org project titled "Been There, Read and Scene That!" was fully funded! At first, the books and bags were paired in Ziplock bags and put on the bulletin board.

After this project, we had too many to fit in that space, so I bought these cool bags and organizer from Really Good Stuff.

Materials from the new project have arrived and have been scanned into Booksource so students can check them out and see their reading levels. Students couldn't wait to use their Reading-Rewards RR miles to borrow books and movies to take home!

  

 Learn more about Reading-Rewards and Booksource here.

Some students are waiting to borrow a book and a movie until Thanksgiving break, when they will have more free time. Here are just a few of the combos we got.

If you'd like a list of books and movies that we received, go to the Donors Choose project list here and click "Where Your Donation Goes". Also check out some movie/book combos I purchased earlier on this older post.

If you're inspired to donate to a current project on DonorsChoose, here's the link for our class!

Rounding Strategies

Here is a video I made to help students with rounding. It teaches several strategies for rounding, including rounding hills, number lines, and place value with a hundreds chart or place value chart. Problems are scaffolded to both teach and challenge students. I hope it's helpful.

Download a freebie worksheet here or click the image.

Click here or the picture to use an interactive number line. It is also a wonderful tool to show decimals through the "zoom in" feature.

Click here or the picture to use the interactive number line jump maker (good for rounding as well as showing addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and patterns on a number line)

Click here or the picture to use interactive place value blocks.

Using highlighters to create independent learners

Do you find yourself spending a lot of time with students who can't seem to write reading responses, read maps, or solve word problems? I have found something that really works for my students - color coding.

Close reading is a big thing in the Common Core. Deciding what is important to highlight is an important and hard skill for students. I teach my kids by going through questions first and kicking out unusual or important words. They get a good idea of the story's plot before even reading. It also improves their comprehension because they know the questions they are going to answer ahead of time. It helps them find answers much more easily, too!

Next, they read the story. Then they answer the questions, highlighting answers in the text. Some kids  "just don't get" what to do when the answer isn't obvious. I have them highlight clues that helped them make an inference or draw a conclusion.

This is a Deepen Comprehension question from Journeys Grade 4 Lesson 5. We were working with the story Stormalong and analyzing characters. 

I projected this on the Promethean Board and we worked together to show the process of turning prewriting into writing. I used colored text and the highlighting tool to show where the information came from. Some students really do need modeling of this!!

Here we used crayons and symbols to answer questions on this Common Core sheets page.

Some of my students really aren't strong readers and typically ignore graphic features. My higher learners can color code themselves. I do it ahead of time for the couple of kids who struggle and over time they learn to do it by themselves.

Now you see another way to use highlighters to draw attention to map features.

Believe it or not, some of your struggling learners don't actually realize that they need to use the picture / map to answer the question. You can do some of the highlighting for them or with them. Eventually they will become independent at it.

How do you use highlighters and color coding to help your children?