Pilgrim Life Diary- A SS/Writing Assignment

The last chapter in our SS book that we have covered, talks about the life of the Pilgrims. During each chapter we try to do a project of some sort that can display and apply the knowledge that we have gained from the reading. This chapter we read and learned about pilgrim life in our textbook and we took to other books to learn about what pilgrim children did.

In this unit, we completed a web hunt to learn more about the life in the colonies. PBS has a website linked below that uses the picture below as an interactive lesson. The students use that site combined with socialstudiesforkids.com site to scavenge for information about how the pilgrims lived.

We also read a couple books, Sarah Morton's Day and Samual Eaton's Day. These books are very kid friendly and describe the daily life of a pilgrim child. My students then look up information on "How to Talk Like a Pilgrim." They really enjoy learning the new phrases and words and use them frequently for a few days.

Then it is off to the races they go creating their own Pilgrim Life Diary. They have to write in 1st person as if they were a pilgrim child. There are strict requirements that there must be great evidence of historical data and research throughout their journals. They must put it together in a book and it must be handwritten and have hand-drawn illustrations. (Insert disappoint kid faces when I said "No, you cannot type it. The pilgrims didn't type their diaries, did they?")

Some of them went above and beyond the call of duty of course. Here are some samples of the amazing work they came up with:

I love the learn book and the pages were so authentic on this one!! One of my favorites! 

Sorry this next one is sideways, but I have little time to fix it! Her cover is clever and very artistic.

Again, sorry for the short time and sideways picture. This male student did a wonderful job researching and basing his writing on research. Writing is the following picture. 

Again sideways, but look how fun and authentic this student was! I couldn't get any good pictures of her writing, but she did very well at talking like a pilgrim! Good Morrow! 

This is the neatest I have seen this student write! I was so proud of all of his effort and the amount of writing the students have me far exceeded my expectations. 

I liked this project last year, but this year I LOVED IT! The students really put more into researching and finding out historically accurate information to put into their story. I think that putting an emphasis on that really helped me out! It is amazing how much we learn as teachers as we teach the same things over and over. We are always tweaking and working to make things better and this is a good example of how I re-taught something the next year with the lessons I learned from the year before! 

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!!

Well Thanksgiving has come and gone and I really enjoyed my week long Thanksgiving Break!! Now as of today I only have 5 more days of school until I get an entire month off!! Woo Hoo!! That means one WHOLE month with my little monster. I absolutely cannot wait!

So what does one do when you only have 9 days of school with only 8 full days of learning time between Thanksgiving and a WHOLE MONTH OFF???

Here it goes...

Reading- We do a novel study of the book Number the Stars by Lois Lowry. As I have stated before, I am a huge fan of Donalyn Miller and all of her reading research, but I just can't help myself when it comes to this novel. (Her research doesn't favor a whole class novel study) There is so much rich history in this novel and my kids always LOVE it. I do not think that I have any students who dislike this book. It is suspenseful and they learn so much about a hard time in history from reading it.

I did change my ways of doing a whole class novel though...I threw out the WORKSHEET packets (YES the one I spent hours creating last year and even have listed on TPT). We took that packet to a different style this time around. I broke down all of the important and trick vocabulary words and broke them down by the chapters that we will be reading. I broke students into 5 groups and gave them a word list. They used their laptops to look up the definitions and recorded them on chart paper. Before we read each section we bust out the vocab poster for those chapters and go over the words. Then as we are reading we stop when we get to those words and use the context to make sure we understand exactly what they author was trying to say. The students who looked up that word are typically the ones who like to be experts and share their knowledge! They really take ownership of it!

We are also working on the plot as we go through the novel. Each student has a plot map and as we read we are recording the important events that are leading up to the climax. One other activity we will be doing tomorrow is that we will be making a poster for each main character and writing down the facts that we  have learned complete with page number/chapter references and text based evidence!! We will add to those as we continue reading. I am really challenging my kids to look deeper at character change. When asked how the characters in their previous book clubs changed, I typically received answers like "they grew older" or "the learned more." So I am hopeful that this activity and doing it together as a class will help them see this in more detail.

Later on in the year we read together the novel The Man Who Love Clowns. This one is a heart breaker and another novel that everyone loves to read. From this novel comes our very in-depth character study. So that is why I am trying to get my readers deeper into character analysis here!

Social Studies- We don't have time to start a new chapter, so instead we research Christmas!! The students are writing a compare and contrast 5 paragraph essay comparing their Christmas traditions to the traditions of another country or religion. Tis the season!

Writing- DEAR SANTA!! It wouldn't be Christmas without a Santa letter! The kids are writing a 3-5 paragraph letter to Santa explaining their #1 gift and how is would benefit them. They are super cute and very convincing! (Examples to come later this week!)

Also, Snowmen at Night...ADORABLE book to read. Check back next week for a post on this wonderful writing assignment where students are going to create their version in PPT!

Math- We are conquering dividing decimals! Wish us luck!

October Writing Projects!

We do a lot of PUBLISHED writing in my class. We go through the writing process SEVERAL times in the first quarter alone. Here are a few of the October Writing Projects that we do.

Halloween Narrative Story- Students are each given a die and an organizer. (ORGANIZER IS FREE HERE) As I flip through the PPT (Available HERE), each student rolls their die and that number corresponds with the story starter element that they will use in their story.

 Other than following those guidelines, I make it fairly limitless. They enjoy these! Some turn out funny and others are spooky! We focused on burying DULL words and buried SAID in our writing for good!

We just finished reading Wonder in class together. If you are an upper level (4th and up) and haven't exposed your students to this book- YOU MUST! It is amazing and teaches so many character lessons! I can't even explain how many standards I was able to address just from reading this aloud as a class read aloud! I will be starting all of my school years with this book from now on!

My students totally bought-in with what I referred to as the PRECEPT CHALLENGE. In the book Mr. Browne gives students a precept at the beginning of each month. These are like life lessons or quotes to live by. They have to write in his class what it means to them. At the end of the school year he challenges each of this students to write their own precept over the summer and to mail it to him on a post card. So I gave my students the precept challenge! They had to come up with a precept that represented them and write a postcard explaining why they chose the one they chose! I also had them create their own "Wonder" portrait like the one of Auggie on the front of the book! This was a quick, but VERY meaningful writing assignment!

Here are a few of my favorites! (Just the illustrations, not their post cards)

The current writing project we are doing is about POINT OF VIEW! We study the different points of view in reading and writing (1st, 2nd, 3rd- Posters Made HERE). Then we talk about taking on the roll of another person or THING... :)

Then BAM- we become a piece of candy on Halloween and we write using this story prompt: 

*Found on Pinterest*

The whole beginning of this post was going to end with AUTOBIOGRAPHIES which we are getting read to start...BUT I am going to save that one for another day! 

Look forward to August-September Writing projects AND Autobiographies SOON! 

The Writing Process

We have been actively working on and have completed our first published writing piece! I always start with a short twisted fairy tale story to go through the writing process with my kiddos. They enjoy it and we work on each step in great detail. This helps outline the process for the rest of the school year!

I always have trouble with finding posters that are Upper Elementary friendly. My kiddos are fairly advanced writers and really need to be able to dig deep and challenge themselves to become better at revising and editing. I used this chart for them to record their own notes and add to their writers notebooks.

I was not very good at using their Writer's Notebooks last year, but this year we are off to a great start of making them a useful organizational tool for writing! So we hole punched this and added it to the reference section along with this checklist:

My room is all fun chevron design so I tried to make these fit the mold. They are informational and I plan to use them as a clip chart to help track the writing stage my kids are at. This will also help the problem of "Who is ready for Peer Editing? So-and-so needs a partner!"

These posters (the full set), checklists, and graphic organizers are all available in my TPT Store HERE! I included the chart/organizer for ARMS and DARE to Revise. I personally like the DARE to Revise because I feel like it is easier to remember than ARMS. :) 

Valentine's Day Metaphors! (FREEBIE)

I have so much to get caught up with on here, but for now here is what I am giving you...

We have been studying similes and metaphors this week. Since Valentine's Day is coming up quickly I decided that my students should write a metaphor for love!!

So here is what I created...

We will hang these in the hall on our bulletin board, but you could make a class book out of them as well! I had originally thought of just using it as a writing prompt, but then had a light bulb moment *METAPHORS*!!  I always love to hear what 5th graders relate love to! Stay tuned for the finished product!!

Click the picture above to get your Love Is... Freebie!!

Main Idea and January "Bulletin Board Worthy" Writing

As a main idea wrap up last week we did Graffiti Posters (See original idea HERE). I have really become a fan of this because it is very interactive and each student gets a change to get involved! (see involved kiddos below)

And for the finished project, students had to have the main idea and supporting details. The details has to be from Text Based Evidence! They have really gotten good at using TBE! I found the articles through our Time For Kids subscription for the students to use. Some of them even took it to an artistic level making their organizers related to the theme of the text! 

Here is a specific TBE. Notice they quoted and can lead you to the EXACT point in which the evidence was retrieved from! Score!! 

Then for the sake of a "quick" writing activity we wrote about melting snowmen! We do a lot of LONG writing pieces in 5th grade. I am at a Laboratory School (private) and most of my kids are at or above grade level. So we spend a lot of time doing what makes us stronger...WRITING! So when I say a quick piece I mean something not completely through the formal WRITING PROCESS. They are very cute! And here is where I copied the Bulletin Board from! It was just too cute to pass up!

I have one more "quick" writing that we did! My kids all have their own computers so we typed this one and I printed their pictures for them. This is something I will keep of theirs. They turned out SOOOO good! (Idea from HERE)

Up next time: Biography Unit! I have made this a MULTI-SUBJECT Project. It contains a book report, formal written biography, magazine and so much more! AND making my office more like MINE. 

Point of View

I am not falling off the blog wagon! I want to share my 5th grade activities with others out there :) (Maybe I was talking to myself a little this morning:)

We have been working on Point of View so far this week. We are studying it during our writing time, but have been applying it to both reading and writing. I found some really great ideas HERE and have been moving right along. I started Day 1 with introducing the 3 P.O.V. and talking about them. Then we watched the Toy Story video clip that is at the link above. The students loved watching this and were able to really look and retell the story from each characters POV.

Then we created a poster together using a picture as a prompt. I followed both of the lessons from Teaching With a Mountain View and they worked GREAT!!

Here is our class poster:

Here is the group posters: (Disclaimer- I really can't wait to get my classroom digital camera in! My phone just doesn't cut it! Sorry for the blur!)

I also made these wonderful posters and a black and white copy that the students pasted in their Language Arts Journals. Here is the link to the FREE Black and White Posters. Purchase the Glittery Posters HERE.

My next plan for POV...bring it into writing with this writing prompt (found here):

One final closing thought...My baby boy turned ONE on Sunday! Isn't he just adorable :)