Tag: 5th grade

I’m still recovering from the weekend, but this week is off to a really great start. I put together a short list of books for the 5th grade teachers at school, who are getting new class sets of 3 novels next year and asked for my help picking them. The short list I gave them included When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead,Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, and After Tupac and D Foster by Jacqueline Woodson. A couple of those are long shots, but they were looking mainly for Newbery books (I threw in TLT because, well, I love it). There are tons of books out there, and tons that I haven’t read, but this was a list of recent books I’ve read and enjoyed, and I think our students would, too. I made up a packet with blurbs and reviews for each book, so that was productive and pretty fun.

I haven’t touched the Rainbow Quilt in at least a week, but that hasn’t stopped me from drooling over the new Riley Blake collection Rainy Days and Mondays by Melinda and Beccabury. I may possibly have ordered some half yards today…in several colorways.

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Read more on Rainy Days and Mondays and a Blog Facelift…

Today was our Read Across America program (Dr. Seuss Day to the kids) at school. It’s the biggest program I organize each year, and this year I teamed up with our reading teacher to get the whole school involved.

Read more on Happy (Early) Birthday, Dr. Seuss!…

firstgradewinterconcert09This week was my school’s winter concert. The first graders (blurry to protect them) performed a song called “The 12 Days in the Rainforest” that one of the first grade teachers wrote. It was awesome, they sang about all the animals in the rainforest. So fun, and they did a fabulous job. Our computer teacher put together a great animated presentation to go along with the song, it was wonderful. The 4th and 5th grade chorus also performed some carols and other songs to get the holiday spirit going.

Read more on Winter Concert…

Okay, actually the 4th and 5th graders just got a refresher on this in October before moving on to learn Google Earth (which I’ll talk about next month). They’re old hands at it now.

Read more on This Month With 3rd, 4th, and 5th Grade: Using the Catalog and Dewey Decimal System…

hiphopcoverOh my goodness, I can’t believe how much fun I had in April talking about hip hop for National Poetry Month.

I spent the month using this book to talk to some of my 4th and 5th graders about rhythm, beats, and structure. We looked at poems side-by-side with some lyrics, and we talked about how both poems and hip hop lyrics have a structure. We talked about how the number of syllables in each line needs to make sense with the whole verse or the way it flows will be broken…that sort of thing. We talked about how hard it can be to write a good poem or a good song, and I read them Nikki Giovanni’s introduction in the book. The intro talks about the roots of hip hop, compares it to opera, warns kids not to be fooled by all the embarassing rap songs out there. True hip hop is like poetry. And on and on and on.

Read more on Hip Hop Speaks to Children with 4th/5th Grade…

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