15 Words or Less Poetry Thursday

Write a poem with 15 words or less about the picture below.

Click on the COMMENTS. Click on anonymous. Type your poem and leave your first name and last initial. 

Volcano 15 words or less Poem Tuesday

Write a poem with 15 words or less about the picture below.

Click on the COMMENTS. Click on anonymous. Type your poem and leave your first name and last initial. 

Motivator from Big Huge Labs: Natural Disasters

Broken Lock Poem Monday

Write a poem with 15 words or less about the picture below.

Click on the COMMENTS. Click on anonymous. Type your poem and leave your first name and last initial. 

Nonfiction Strategies Anchor Charts

We read the Time for Kids article called "Building a Tsunami Warning System." What I like about this article is that the students do not have much schema about this topic and, more importantly, it has procedural text embedded into the article. 

We also read a smaller article in Time for Kids about Citrus Greening Disease that is happening in Florida. We did the main idea of each subheading and then creating a nonfiction summary based on our main ideas. 

This is how we approached procedural text. I was noticing that most procedural do not stand alone but embedded into a larger article. This Time for Kids article was about the cause and effect of fertilizer in riverbeds. We analyzed the text features of procedural text. 

Comparing Genres: Folktales, Tall Tales, and Myths

Writing on the Walls

We borrowed text structure from the master of writing Gretchen Bernabei with a little spin to make it our own. The purple text structure is for our animal research. We wanted to add an element of science TEKS about animal adaptions and inherited traits. The yellow text structure is for our biography on Martin Luther King Jr. 

Please DO NOT get the impression that this is fill-in-the-blank. Sometimes, and I have to say most of the time, my students need structure in their writing. In fact, a few students need just one box to start their piece. But thinking about my SpEd and LEP students, this is a great scaffold. 

We have been publishing like crazy! Students are exploring expository text about Martin Luther King Jr and Animal Research Project. I am loving the writing all over the place instead of just my anchor charts.