Friday, January 25, 2013

Independent Projects by Bridget

Independent projects are all about, well, you can do anything. You can do comics, interviews, plays, and stories. We do them during writing and it's super fun.  You get to talk and talk about what you are doing.

I am doing an interview and it is fun. I walk around and ask people questions.

First, you get a proposal and fill it out. These are some of the things we do on a proposal. First, you write what genre and topic you will do then you write how you will use your writer's notebook. After that you write what your mentor text will be then you write when you will be done. And that's how to do an independent project.

Note from the teachers: the video above was created by Bridget to showcase some of the independent project work going on in our room.

Six Word Essays

Last week we published and celebrated our essays. Part of our celebration included writing our essays as six word essays, inspired by Ernest Hemingway's six-word memoir.

Writing our essays in six words was challenging. It required us to do the hard work of determining importance and synthesis of several week's worth of writing.



Friday, January 11, 2013

How to do Brain Breaks by Bryn

We do brain breaks when we need to calm down. Brain breaks are a fun way to calm down.

We do brain breaks when we get too loud.

Brain breaks are easy to do. For example, if you do yoga, you will know what the tree pose is. It's when you put one of your legs to your knee and put your hands above your head.

My favorite brain break is a one minute dance party. It's when your teacher plays music and you dance. At the end, you always hear, "Awww."


In the video above, Bryn demonstrates and explains some of our brain breaks.