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We started
this project in our writing class by looking at the pictures in
Snowmen at Night. Mrs. Ahlbrecht covered up all of the
author�s words with sticky notes. We looked only at the
pictures. On the first page, our class shared their ideas about
what was happening in the story. Everything we said was typed on
the SmartBoard. Our sentences were really mixed up. Some people
said the same thing in a different way.
Our
story needed work. We took turns using the SmartBoard pens to
add adjectives to help the reader get a picture in his mind.
Sometimes we moved the sentences around so that they made more
sense. Since we had done this writing on the computer, it was
easy to clean it up and publish the first page of our story.
Our
writing time each day was used to write our own version of
Snowmen At Night. Some days we worked as a whole class and
other days we worked by ourselves. We only worked on one picture
page a day, so writing this story took us about two weeks. It
was fun using the carets and pens to �wedge� in adjectives after
our first draft was finished each day. After a few days, we
started using adjectives as we were writing the story. Every
child has their own copy of the class pages with their own pages
inserted in order. The pages the class wrote were published with
the ZBManuscript Grid font. The pages the students wrote on
their own were a combination of handwritten or typed.
The
science unit on �Solids, Liquids, and Gases� started a little
early this year. We had a beautiful snowfall that was begging an
observation study of snow snowflakes. Excitement was high when
the students entered the room that January day. It was our first
snowfall of the season and we were not used to waiting that long
for snow in South Dakota.
We collected
ice cream buckets of fresh, clean snow and brought them in the
classroom to make predictions, observe, record, and discover
what would actually happen compared to what we thought would
happen. What a surprise we had!
In
language arts, we read the story of Snowflake Bentley.
First we read the fiction story and then we went back and read
the nonfiction story. At recess, we took out black construction
paper and magnifying glasses to catch and study snowflakes like
Wilson Bentley did when he was a boy.
The students
wrote their own acrostic and cinquain snow poetry. They used
their keyboarding skills to do their own publishing in Microsoft
Word. Our district technology standards for word processing
requires the students to do the following at the beginner or
emergent level:
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