Reading+and+Writing

We read the book // The Best Part of Me: Children Talk About their Bodies in Pictures and Words. // In this book, children write about their favorite body part and what makes it the best. Then we used the book to inspire a piece of self-reflective writing about our own bodies. Students were encouraged to pick a body part, think of several reasons why that part was important or special to them, and then invited to write a poem or descriptive paragraph about their body part. Visit our student pages to read about our best parts!

** Poetry ** Our class enjoys writing poetry. We have experimented with a variety of types of poems like Haiku, acrostic, cinquain, and free verse. Sometimes we visit one of our favorite websites to create a poem online. That is how we created our "I Am" and "Yes That's Me" poems. You can try it too. Click on this link to visit the website and try it yourself*: []

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We explored the genre of mysteries. We used Chris Van Allsburg's book the Mysteries of Harris Burdick as inspiration for story writing. Each student selected one page from the book and began planning a story by identifying key details in the photos. From there, students used their observations and their imaginations to define the basic elements of their stories (characters, setting, plot, theme). After that students drafted their stories using the single line from the book as a hook. Many students have shared their completed mysteries on their pages. Take a look and let us know what you think.