In 7/8th Humanities this week we worked on finishing our Global Read Aloud projects. We had two components of the project left to complete: adapting our journals into a new style of writing (already in progress) and constructing a detailed paragraph about the theme of the book. We used the document below to gather and organize our thoughts about the theme of the book based on our conversations about theme from last week. We determined some topics from the novel that could be turned into themes, brainstormed a few possibilities, and then got to work outlining and writing our paragraphs. Miss G and Mr. C provided some feedback to us on our first drafts and we made revisions before turning in our final drafts. Next week, we will spend some time looking at the results and determining our areas of growth since our last writing assignment and the areas that we need to keep focusing on in the future.
We were also excited to welcome students, teachers and the principal from Crossett Brook Middle School in Duxbury to visit our 7/8 Humanities class on Wednesday as part of the Tarrant Institute Learning Lab. We also welcomed Tarrant Institute representative Susan Hennessey who helped to document the visit through photos and video. We enjoyed speaking with the CBMS crew about what we are learning, projects we are creating and what we enjoy most about attending Orleans Elementary. We also shared our hopes for the future and asked them some questions about how they do things similarly or differently than we do. We are planning to visit them at their school sometime in the spring! Check out photos from the visit as well as the video that was created by Miss Gratton and Mr. Chadburn to explain what our Learning Lab goals are for this year.
In 5/6 Humanities we spent the week continuing our independent workshops on Geography and Parts of Speech. During our guided workshops, we focused on practicing paragraph writing skills and we started analyzing our surroundings in the village using Google Earth and categorizing our observations into natural items and man-made items.
We continued reading our read aloud novel, The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora, and started a few new activities. We continue to collect vocabulary words in our glossaries, characters in our character lists, and examples of the types of communities. Now, we are also digging deeper into those topics by sketching some critical scenes and characters in our journals using details we found in the text of the book. There are some pretty creative results!
We continued reading our read aloud novel, The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora, and started a few new activities. We continue to collect vocabulary words in our glossaries, characters in our character lists, and examples of the types of communities. Now, we are also digging deeper into those topics by sketching some critical scenes and characters in our journals using details we found in the text of the book. There are some pretty creative results!