Integration

I am excited for the next few months. Reading, writing, history, math and our focus on community are all starting to collide. We are always trying to integrate. We look for connections between all that we do, but this time it is all coming together so seamlessly. Here is a little peek.

 

What types of challenges do the characters face in the books we read?

We read aloud the book The Search For Delicious by Natalie Babbitt.
We looked for the challenges the main character faced.
What did he learn from his experience and how can we apply that lesson to our lives?

How did the characters learn and change from these challenges?

What can we learn about life from watching the journey of our characters?

We began to look for the conflicts that drove the story in all of the books we read.
Every book containing a story has also contained a conflict of some kind.
We keep adding to our chart.

Where do authors get their ideas for the challenges they give to their characters?

Challenges seem to get worse before they get better, so how do authors build the tension of the challenge before it gets resolved?

 

We researched the work of published authors.
We read and mapped out the story of picture books on a
"story mountain" to help us identify the story arch.

Who will be our characters in the stories we write?

What challenges will they face?

Thinking about their own writing, the children began to develop fictional characters.
What are their inner characteristics as well as their outer?
We know that in each of our stories, the characters will need to face challenges.

Are there challenges you have faced (or seen others face) that you could give to your characters?

·         Scared of the dark

·         bullies

·         wanting to fit in

·         never getting to do things because you are the youngest

·         not wanting a lot of attention

·         being scared to do something on your own

·         peer pressure

·         not wanting lots of attention

·         a brother who teases

·         always being late

·         not knowing how to write fiction

·         stage fright

·         words always coming out the wrong way

As authors, the children began to plan out their own fictional writing on a story mountain.
They gave careful thought to how the story would build over time before being resolved.

 

How can listening to others for understanding and empathy help us resolve conflicts within our own community?

 

We have been thinking about these Habits of Mind.
We have talked about persistence and controlling impulses.
Our current focus is on listening to others with understanding and empathy.
We are finding that it is a skill we can use to become better
at just about everything (including math, reading and writing)

 

How can listening to the characters for understanding and empathy make us better readers?

"If I were Jessie, I would be feeling both excited and scared. I would be really scared and sad to leave without Grandmother, but this was a once in a lifetime opportunity."

How can listening to our fictional characters for understanding and empathy help us figure out what to write when we get stuck?

 

One student came for a conference about her fiction writing. "I am coming to the most important scene in my whole story and I don't know what to write because I've never had this happen to me before." We decided that this was a time to practice empathy, even if her character was not real. She closed her eyes and imagined herself in the character's exact situation. What thoughts would she have? What emotions would she be feeling? What would her body be doing? What would she see or hear? The student went back to her seat to translate her moment in her character's shoes into action and setting and dialogue.

How does listening to stories of the past for understanding and empathy help us understand the people of the past?

We are beginning to fill our time with historical fiction and non-fiction books about immigration.
We read with empathy, imagining what it might feel like to be those characters.

We are making a timeline. We will use it to begin to develop a sense of history.
It gets us to do lots of calculating. If every year is a half inch, how long would your life be on this number line?
If someone was born in 1836 and came to America in 1903, how old were they when they arrived?

What was it like to immigrate to America? What challenges did our ancestors face?

We are beginning to hear stories of the ancestors of class members.
There stories bring the past to life.
This was not just some random person a long time ago, it was Cameron's ancestor!

Could the challenges of the past be the inspiration for our next fiction stories?

We hear about how our ancestors traveled to America, why they chose to
come and what their hopes were for future generations.

 

 

Can our ancestors inspire our next characters?

As we look over records of our ancestors I began to wonder if we could use what we find in
 our history investigation to inspire us to write historical fiction.
We have character profiles just staring at us from the pages of history.
What an exciting way to connect to our own people.