It was another busy week in all of Mrs. Leonardo’s sixth grade classes! Let’s take a look at what students learned:

Monday:  We started preparing to read Jim Murphy’s excerpt, The Great Fire. Students learned the importance of activating prior knowledge, and we discussed the differences between the connotation and the denotation of a word. We then typed connotations for the term devastation after watching videos about wildfires. This was an important topic of discussion because of California’s current drought and the wildfires raging across California (read about how to help victims of these fires here).

Tuesday: We set a purpose for reading The Great Fire; I introduced students to annotating the text, and we discussed the characteristics of informational text. The student sample above shows annotations after we read the text a total of three times. The before reading portion on the back page is the student’s thoughts from day one. Before reading the text, we read paragraphs one and six in order to build background knowledge.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday: Students learned how to infer by using clues in the text. This particular lesson spanned across three days because some students knew what inferences were, but they didn’t know how to infer. Some admitted that they had no idea what an inference was. Wednesday was spent learning about inferences and how to infer, Thursday was spent practicing how to infer, and Friday was devoted to finding themes within specific paragraphs of The Great Fire.

We’re preparing to write a summary of The Great Fire, then students will create videos in iMovie about the great Chicago fire using toys and green screen! We spent the last half of Friday getting to know the green screen app!

I spent some time updating my YouTube channel this weekend; you can get all of the details here.

This week we will be wrapping up our reading, writing a summary, and preparing to get the ball rolling with our green screen project. More details to come!