Personal Essays Hanging Around Town

Our second published pieces of the year - our personal essays - are now up around town! You'll find a breakdown of whose pieces are hanging where below.

Each essayist chose a goal for the unit from three of the big focuses we had as a class: writing a strong introduction, organizing in paragraphs, or elaborating our essays by including anecdotes and examples to support our ideas. While each essayist had one goal in particular, you'll find evidence of all three goals in each of the pieces you read.

We used mentor texts (published essays) to help us write strong introductions and conclusions, sometimes mimicking the phrasing or craft moves (e.g. making an interesting comparison or including our experiences with our topic) that the mentor texts used in their introductions and conclusions. Using mentor texts in this way helps push us to try new things as writers. We also studied anecdotes in mentor texts and noticed that many of the craft moves we learned in personal narrative (like, dialogue, inner thought, and tiny actions) can still be used in our essays to support our thesis idea.

At the end of our unit, we wrote six word essays, inspired by Ernest Hemingway's six word memoir. This required us to synthesize our essay; after several weeks of elaborating, we had to get down to the heart of what we were trying to say across many paragraphs, and sometimes pages, and say it in just six words. This work is more challenging than it first appears! You can find our six word essays hanging outside of Room 101.

Here's where you can find our pieces (by the end of the year, we'll all have been shared in each place, but we will have some repeats of where you'll find our piece along the way):

Tavolo - Will, Caroline, Evan, Lauren, Scarlett, RJ, Ryan, Eva, Jackson, Matt, Antonio, and Emma

River Road Books - Vivian, Alex, Patrick, and Ben

Fairwinds - Georgia, Megan, Dylan, Annie, and Serafina

first published pieces are up around town!

Our first published pieces have been hung around town! You can find our published personal narratives at Tavolo, Fairwinds, and River Road Books. We're so lucky to have places in town that value our writing and allow us to hang it to share with others!

Personal narratives are true stories from our lives. In this unit, we worked hard to write in the moment, rather than a summary, using details like tiny actions, dialogue, setting, and inner thought. We set goals for our writing at the beginning of the unit, choosing one of the three goals: writing a strong lead, using a storytelling voice, or elaborating (stretching out) the heart of our story. Comparing the personal narrative on demand that we wrote on the first day of school with our published piece and on demand at the end of the unit, one month later, showed so much growth for us already as writers!

Here's a break down of whose pieces are where:

Tavolo - Emma, Antonio, Vivian, Jackson, Georgia, Annie, Matt, Megan, Ben, Alex, Dylan, and Patrick
Fairwinds - Evan, Eva, Caroline, Serafina, and RJ
River Road Books* - Ryan, Scarlett, Will, and Lauren

*pieces at River Road Books will be up by the end of next week. They're doing some renovations on Monday and thought it would be best for us to wait to hang them so that our pieces aren't damaged.

We hope you're able to visit the place hosting your piece, but also make it to the other places to read our classmates' pieces.

Published Fantasy Pieces Around Fair Haven

Room 101's published fantasy pieces are hanging around town! Thanks to Jack M., Caroline, Harris, and their families for helping to hang these pieces! As always, we're so appreciative of Fair Haven businesses that are supportive of our writing work.

When you check out our fantasy pieces, be sure to scan the QR code hanging in front of each piece to hear the writer read aloud his or her "about the author." You may also want to take our pieces out (they're our most elaborated pieces so far this year) so that you can read the entire story, including the character cards or setting maps we included at the back of our pieces (most of our fantasy books had these, and we wanted to include them, too!).

Here's where you can find our pieces:

Tavolo - Ellie, Connor, Cameron, Jack S., Maia, Marcus, Megan, Harris, Lily, Lucas, Christina, Maisy, Braiden, Quinn, and James

Fairwinds - Harry, Patrick, and Caroline

River Road Books - Sophie, Jack M., Sal, and Maddie

Vocabulary Work

Every other week or so, we've introduced 3-5 new vocabulary words to the class. These words have been tied to our class work somehow; they may have appeared in a read aloud, been used to describe traits as learners that we're working to adopt, or are more sophisticated words to use in our writing and speaking.

When introducing new vocabulary words, we teach the definition, synonyms, and antonyms words explicitly and the students copy them in their vocabulary notebooks along with a sentence and picture for each word. Additionally, we have physical actions that we do as we say each word that help us recall the meaning of the words. We post our vocabulary word cards (pictured below) around our room. They're color-coded to show what part of speech each word is and have the synonyms in the right-hand corners and antonyms in the left-hand corners.

We've recently begun wearing a vocabulary word on Friday. Each student is given a word on a lanyard as he or she arrives Friday morning, we greet each other with our vocabulary names, and then do our best to use the words throughout the day. Our goal is that we begin to use these words more automatically in our speaking and writing and that we recognize them in our reading. 

During Lit Skills, we've spent some time working on getting to know these words more thoroughly. We've written and performed vocabulary raps, taken turns leading the class in mimicking the motion to our word, and, most recently, created short skits that show the meaning of the words.

The videos below show our most recent work with the skits inspired by tingoed.com. We used the video for "chide" on Tingo Ed for inspiration (you can watch that video here: http://www.tingoed.com/vocab-videos---chide.html). The videos show our work towards growing more comfortable with the words.

Published Book Reviews

Room 101 has recently published book reviews on our class book review blog, Room 101's Must Reads. You can read our book reviews here: http://fourthgrade101bookreviews.blogspot.com.

We chose to review books that we have strong opinions about and knew well (i.e. in addition to having read all of the book we chose, we also had some writing about our reading in our reader's notebook that we used to begin to gather our ideas about the book). During this unit, we studied mentor texts (published book reviews), paying particular attention to the structure and language used in the book reviews. We learned that, in addition to the reviewer's general opinion, book reviews often include a partial summary, thoughts on the author's craft, quotes from the book, and a recommendation for the type of reader who will enjoy the book. 

Having just finished our Touch Typing class, we took the opportunity to type our published pieces for the first time this year. The class worked in the computer lab for one writing workshop period, typing in a document through their Google Drive accounts. Typing in Google Drive allowed students to finish publishing at home. 

We hope our reviews help you find your next book!

Published Personal Essays Around Fair Haven

We're excited to share that our personal essays have been hung around town! Thanks to Sal, Ellie, Maddie, and their families for helping to hang these pieces.

Each hanging piece also has a QR code in front of it. The QR codes are the black and white images that can be scanned with a smartphone (there are free apps to scan them). Once the QR code is scanned, you'll be sent to a link that will allow you to listen to the class read our six word essays.

Here's a breakdown of whose pieces are where:

Tavolo - Patrick, Harry, Sophie, Jack M., Sal, Megan, Harris, Lily, Lucas, Christina M., Maisy, Braiden, Quinn, Chrisina U., and James

Fairwinds - Ellie, Caroline, and Connor

River Road Books - Maddie, Jack S., Maia, and Marcus

We're so thankful to these Fair Haven businesses for allowing us the space to share our writing!

Hershey Mass Production

We're currently studying the Northeast region in social studies. One of our essential questions is, "Why did our nation's first factories start here?" We learned that the water and people in the Northeast region influenced factories being built here. Many factories were built near rivers and used the water to power their factories. In addition, the Northeast's population provided people power for the factories.

We "stopped" at the Hershey Factory to learn about mass production. Students worked in groups of three and specialized in one job: wrap cutter, candy placer, or candy wrapper. For three minutes, students worked in an assembly line to (re)wrap Hershey Kisses. Groups wrapped between 8 and 15 pieces of candy during this time.

After the activity, we thought a little about what it would be like to work in a factory, specializing in one job, for a 40 hour work week. Many students recognized it may not be as exciting to do the same job for eight hours a day as it was to do it for three minutes in class.

The video below includes some photos and video of our mass production.

Hershey Mass Production from kate mills on Vimeo.

Six Word Essays

We recently published our personal essays. As part of our publishing, we wrote six word essays, inspired by Ernest Hemingway's six word memoir. Though six words may not sound difficult to write, this work required writers to synthesize weeks of essay work.

Please enjoy the video of our class reading our six word essays.

Nonfiction Celebration

For the past month, we've been reading nonfiction texts and learning how to move from thinking about topics to thinking about main ideas that are supported with facts and details (i.e. evidence) from the text.

To celebrate this hard work, students chose a page of notes from their reader's notebook that they were particularly proud of and created a visual that taught an idea from the text with evidence. They added color to show meaning and may have included visuals. The work on each student's poster came from their notes on their nonfiction reading.

Before our celebration, students practiced teaching their reading partner and gave and received feedback to improve their presentation. They presented their posters to a group of three classmates. We ended the celebration with a gallery walk to share our notes and posters with the whole class.

The video below includes photos of the posters created as well as a few moments of the teaching happening.

Realistic Fiction Pieces Around Fair Haven

We're excited to share that our realistic fiction pieces have been hung around town! Thanks to Caroline, Lucas, James, and their families for helping to hang these pieces.

Each hanging piece also has a QR code in front of it. The QR codes are the black and white images that can be scanned with a smartphone (there are free apps to scan them). Once the QR code is scanned, you'll be sent to a link that will allow you to listen to the writer read golden lines from his or her piece. Hearing the lines read aloud by the writer really brings the writing to life!

Golden lines were chosen, practiced, and recorded by the writer. The lines reflect the writing goals of each writer during this unit. Some of our goals were to use a variety of details (e.g. action, thought, dialogue, setting...) and to include sensory details and figurative language. (Some writers had the goal of add paragraphs more consistently throughout their piece, which won't be reflected in their recording.)

Here's a breakdown of whose pieces are where:

Tavolo - Jack S., Maia, Marcus, Harry, Patrick, Sophie, Jack M., Sal, Maddie, Megan, Harris, Lily, Lucas, Christina M., Maisy, and Braiden

Fairwinds - Quinn, Christina U., and James

River Road Books - Ellie, Caroline, Connor, and Cameron

We're so thankful to these Fair Haven businesses for allowing us the space to share our writing!

Thankful List Poem

During the month of November, writers in room 101 kept a list of things we're thankful for, adding to the list gradually throughout the month.

Today, we read some list poems from the poetry anthology Falling Down the Page and we each chose items from our personal thankful lists that we wanted to include in our class list poem.

Our published list poem hanging outside room 101.

Room 101 has so much to be grateful for.

Personal Narratives around Fair Haven

We are excited to announce that our first published pieces, our personal narratives, are hanging in local Fair Haven businesses. Thanks so much to Tavolo, Fairwinds, and River Road Books for so generously giving us space to share our pieces with a wider audience!


Here's a breakdown of whose pieces are where:

Tavolo - Ellie, Caroline, Connor, Cameron, Jack S., Maia, Marcus, Harry, Patrick, Sophie, Jack M., Megan, Maddie, Harris, Sal, and Lily

Fairwinds - Lucas, Christina M., and Maisy

River Road Books - Quinn, Braiden, Christina U., and James


At the end of each unit, we'll swap out the published pieces and update you with where each writer's piece can be found.

We hope that you're able to stop by and read our class's writing soon!

pieces hanging at Tavolo

pieces hanging at Fairwinds

pieces hanging at River Road Books

one week in!

Our first week was a busy one! Across the week, we began to work on creating a classroom environment that will help us all be successful. We thought about what we value as individuals, our expectations of ourselves and others, and created a class agreement.

We've also dug right in to our work. We learned how to choose just right books, began reading books (many classmates have finished at least one book already!), started a list of Burning Story Ideas in our writer's notebooks, and took a math pre-assessment.

We ended the week by talking about how we've already grown since the first week of school and had our notebook decorating party and first Motion and Design challenge in science. The video below includes some photos from our notebook decorating party and the science challenge.

Social Issues Celebration

For the past month, we've read with a focus on social issues. We grew the chart below as we read across many books this year, identifying in clubs or whole class conversations the issues, ideas, and concepts hidden in the text we read.

Our work during social issues focused largely on determining what each text taught us about the issues and then pushing ourselves to be the kind of readers who change our own ideas as a result of reading the text.

During this unit, in addition to returning to favorite read alouds and rereading them (many we know by heart, practically), we read Wonder by RJ Palacio. (We're sure you know this already, as it's been a favorite in our class and most likely mentioned at home by now.)

In Wonder, one of Auggie's teachers, Mr. Browne, has precepts for each month. Similar to our class agreement - our precept - If you work really hard and are kind, amazing things will happen - Mr. Browne's September precept was "When given the choice between being right or being kind, choose kind."

To celebrate our work for the past month on social issues, each student chose an issue, idea or concept from our chart and wrote his own precept. This felt like an appropriate way to end our time together. We share them with you in the video below.

Book Reviews

Room 101 published book reviews a few weeks ago. You can find our published reviews on our book review blog, Room 101's Must Reads: http://fourthgrade101bookreviews.blogspot.com/. Maybe your next read is hiding in one of our reviews!

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.

Digging Deep in Our Reading: A Look at Some Charts

Perhaps the most important purpose for the charts we create with students during mini-lessons is that they become a tool for students to independently try the strategies that have been taught. An important part of the reading unit we've just finished (a unit that focused on characters and in which we also learned how to negotiate reading  and talking about a book with a partner) has been digging deep through writing, talking, and thinking about our reading.

Picture this: a mosquito skims the surface of McCarter Pond, maybe causing a little ripple in the water but, really, making no impact. Then, there's a duck that goes completely into the water, splashing around, even diving deep, down to the bottom, to try and find some food.

Earlier this fall, we related this image to our reading. We have a choice. We can choose to be mosquito readers, skimming the surface of our books, going quickly from page to page or book to book, not pausing to think deeply about our reading. Readers who read like mosquitoes aren't changed by their reading. Or we could read like ducks, digging deep into our books by stopping to think, talk, and write about our reading. In this way, we'd read in a way that allows books to change us, to give us new ideas.

Thinking, talking, and writing deeply isn't an easy task. Simply: it's hard. It's easier to stick to the plot of the story, missing the chance to really have ideas. What's harder (and, therefore, as fourth graders in our room know, has bigger pay-off for a reader) is to really dig deep, thinking about our ideas and supporting them with textual evidence.

We've been learning when to stop, think, write, and talk about our reading and also how to do this most effectively. We'd like to share the charts we've been using in class so that it may support talking about reading in a deeper way at home. Our readers have had a lot of practice borrowing phrases off of the chart and using them as they think, write, and talk more deeply about their reading; we are sure they'd be happy to teach you how to use the charts.

The first chart is a chart that helps readers know when it often pays off to do some writing about their reading. The column on the left lists (some of) these different times; the column on the right gives a vision for different ways the writing about reading at that stopping point could go.

The second chart is from our character unit and shows some of the strategies taught during mini-lessons. Under each strategy are a few post-its that students have been using as they've done their own writing and talking about reading.

Hope this helps you dig deeper in your talk with your child about his or her reading. Now, we're on to nonfiction reading!

Things Room 101 Is Thankful For

Today, the day before Thanksgiving, we published a class poem titled Things Room 101 Is Thankful For. Our poem is a list poem, inspired by Georgia Heard's Falling Down the Page, and used parts of the thankful lists we've been keeping in our writer's notebooks for the last week and a half.

 The published poem hanging outside our classroom door.

Writers in our room chose items off their thankful list, decided what kind of punctuation they'd want to include within and at the end of their line, and also made decisions about where to place their line (their sentence strip) in relation to the line above theirs in the poem.

Please enjoy the video below, which includes the sound of our first-read of the poem (turn your volume up:) and photos of each line as they were added to the poem.

Room 101 feels like there is a lot to be thankful for and we hope you do, too. Happy Thanksgiving!

Thirteen Ways of Getting Through a Hurricane

Hey Fourth Graders (and Mrs. Barnett!),

How are you doing? I've been thinking about you all week, wondering how you're doing. I (probably obviously, since I'm able to do this blog post), have power back, and am wishing, wishing, wishing it back on in Fair Haven for you all.

I'm sure you have Burning Story Ideas you've been adding to your WNB at home, that you've been enjoying the unexpected time with your family and friends. I'm anxious to get back to school and hear your stories.

Some people on Facebook update their status each day in November with something they're thankful for. We'll each start our own thankful list in our WNB as soon as we're back (you can, of course, start it before we're back if you want!).

Until then, though, I wanted to share a poem that I've been working on. Coreen, my best friend, suggested that we use a poem called Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens as a mentor to write our own poems about how we've gotten through the blackout and Hurricane Sandy.

So, I'm including my poem at the end of this post- maybe we'll all write our own next week as a writing homework. It would be fun to see how we all got through this hurricane.

See you soon!

Thirteen Ways of Getting Through a Hurricane

Invite neighbors over

who you’ve meant to have over,

but haven’t yet,

and play card games

by the candlelight.

Sleep in.

Pull all the candles out,

from every drawer

and cabinet

and shelf

and move them around with you,

from kitchen to family room,

to light your way.

Make two trips to 711 to call family:

Cell phones aren’t working.

All’s ok.

Use spaghetti noodles

to light the gas stove

and cook whatever’s

thawed in the freezer

(it will be bad by tomorrow).

Download new books

on your kindle

and read them

under two blankets

because it’s chilly

without the heat.

Hold your breath

and scrub

fast,

fast,

fast,

in an ice cold shower.

Then sprint back

to the aforementioned

two blankets.

Nap.

Take walks through town.

When the nights seem

to be creeping by,

move to Derek’s Jeep,

charge phones

(still not working, but just in case…),

plug the laptop in,

and watch Parenthood episodes.

Take a trip to Sickles

and stock up on “necessities”:

salad,

turkey sloppy joe's,

mashed potatoes,

sandwich,

caramel chocolate popcorn.

Do a celebration dance

when the power

comes

back

on.

Independent Projects - Launched!

On Monday, Room 101 was abuzz with excitement over independent writing projects.

Students brainstormed possibilities for a chart of what writing can become and filled out proposals for their projects. Proposals required writers to name the topic and genre of their piece, plan their notebook work (pre-drafting work), choose mentor texts (published texts in the same genre as their project), and choose a tentative due date. Students spent writing workshop on Tuesday and Wednesday beginning to work on their independent projects.

The photo above shows the brainstorming the writers in Room 101 did about possible independent projects. (Click to see a larger, easier to read image:)

The work of independent projects is so valuable because students are able to explore an often new genre they are interested in and take themselves independently through the writing process. Some of the independent projects our writers are undertaking include: comics, plays, sports programs, picture books, fantasy stories, and interviews.

As we enter into this new world of balancing two writing pieces (independent projects and our class genre piece, currently realistic fiction), we will be learning that it's important that we do not rush through our realistic fiction work to get to our independent projects. Instead, we will use independent projects to help fill our writing time with writerly activities. One way students will show that they are balancing their writing work is through their plan box, which shows their own, individual, plan for writing workshop each day. Students may choose to work on independent projects as one of the three activities in their plan box.

In Room 101, the feeling is, indeed, that there is so much writing to be done.