Southerncandee's Weblog

Native American Poetry Project

Candace Hensley — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 17:45:24 +0000

Poetry Project

Candace Hensley — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 03:09:07 +0000

I have loved teaching poetry in my class. We have been creating a poetry unit on Native Americans of North Carolina which is what we are studying in Social Studies. For language arts we are reading pourquoi tales. I cannot believe how well everything is integrating. The students are absolutely loving this project. Students have been familiarized with haikus, acrostics, concrete poems, I Poems, and Color Poems. I have lots of examples, read my poems, and read the awesome selection of books from the class. They LOVED Technically It’s Not My Fault. The students were able to pick which type of poem they wanted to complete. Then they gathered into groups; I have been monitoring and revising with the different groups. I am going to put their work together to make a Native American poetry book. I told the students that I would copy their poems and everyone could make their own class poetry book.

To Dance

Candace Hensley — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 02:44:25 +0000

I loved this graphic novel. I think it would be an excellent way to get non-motivated readers involved in reading. Some students think books such as this one are not allowed into the classroom. I think some teachers are reluctant to put graphic novels in their classroom because they think these are all the students will read. I loved how emotional this book was. It made me feel as though I was right there experiencing the feelings and emotions of the dancer. I can see how little girls would see how their dreams can become reality through this book.

Family Pictures

Candace Hensley — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:45:27 +0000

I thought this was a excellent multicultural memoir. I loved how the pictures flowed so perfectly with the words. As I was reading I thought about how I might could use this book in my classroom. I thought it might be great to use this book during Cinco de Mayo. I always do some type of activity/activities around the first week of May. I think this would be a great way to incoporate family customs. Students could learn a lot from reading this book. I also think this would be a great book for Hispanic children. By having Spanish text to go along with English text students who are Hispanic may feel more at ease about reading. They could also help the class read some words/phrases in Spanish. This always makes my Hispanic students feel good.

Shortcut

Candace Hensley — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:49:48 +0000

This was a very simple book that could teach a lesson to any child. It is hard for me to imagine why anyone would want to walk along train tracks. Not even a year ago my uncle (father’s brother) was killed by a train. This story related to me in a much different way than it may relate to many other people. All I could think of was for the children to get off the tracks. Maybe this will be a good way to tell children why they should always listen to their parents when it comes to dangerous activities.

My Rotten Redheaded Older Brother

Candace Hensley — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:24:27 +0000

This was such a cute story. As I was reading I thought back to my childhood. I have a brother who is 14months older than me. He would always call me names, just because he could, when we were little. My mother said as soon as I came home from the hospital he was angry that he wasn’t the center of attention anymore. As we got older our relationship changed (like the relationship changed in the story). I love the brotherly/sisterly love. It’s such a competition when you’re younger. The oldest child almost always throws up that they are the oldest and therefore assumes that they are the best at everything. Although, I think this might be a man thing. My fiance can’t stand to lose in anything. I think the older brother really loved his sister; he was just being a guy. I loved the part about the rhubarb when he told her he didn’t like it he loved it and then the grandma made her favorite rhubarb pie. This is a cute book that I know will spark up a lot of conversation in my classroom.

Red Ribbon Week

Candace Hensley — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:09:17 +0000

So as my students and I were putting up our door decorations for Red Ribbon Week I glanced to my neighbor’s door. She was putting up tombstones with writing on them. Each tombstone was created by a child. They had make believe characters and reasons that they had “died.” The reasons were all related to drugs. I am not describing this door very well but I will take a picture of it and either post the picture (with her permission) or edit this description when I remember exactly what was on certain tombstones. I thought this was sort of a multi genre aspect of Red Ribbon Week. They learned how drugs can affect you and incorporated tombstones of fictional people who have “died” from doing drugs.

Side note: I take pictures of bulletin boards that I like or bulletin boards that I have created, print the pictures and put them in an index card box labeled Bulletin Boards. I have different tabbed dividers for months/holidays. The box sits on my desk. This way I will remember how to recreate a past bulletin board or borrow and recreate one from another teacher.

Diary writing

Candace Hensley — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:00:43 +0000

So my students are still loving their diary writing. They voted to call it a diary. Sometimes they even want to write during silent reading time. We shared some of our entries the other day. Before we shared our entries I had a little girl ask me to read hers to myself. She had written about how she was very sad that her daddy didn’t want to take her for the weekend but wanted to take her brother. He was actually her step father but he was the only father she’d ever known. He is her brother’s birth father. She had two paragraphs. One was about her father being a devil and one was about her mother being her angel. She had then drawn two pictures at the bottom of her paper dipicting this. I was amazed at how much information I had gathered by reading this simple page. Of coarse I told her that it might be better to read something else aloud. I didn’t want the whole class knowing her business. I am so enthused at the amazing quality of these diaries. I just LOVE them.

Writing Without Boundaries p 105-end

Candace Hensley — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 01:52:20 +0000

I feel that, as stated on page 106, I too am very critical of taking on a new project such as multi genre writing. It’s not that I wouldn’t want to do this in my classroom. Do they really relate to the curriculum? Will students get everything they need to succeed on the writing assessments? I feel as though there is so much pressure when you are a new teacher. So much is expected of you and you’re the underdog. I have been hesitant to incorporate multigenre writing into my classroom because of our new writing expectations. We’re teaching Empowering Writers which takes up the majority of our writing time.

I’ve seriously thought about doing the North Carolina scrapbook in my classroom even if the other teachers don’t. It was a take home project last year. However, I feel I could somehow use some of my social studies time to work on multigenre writing along with social studies and therefore get new ideas into their brains. I think they would love this.

So I’ve just gotten off topic and I’ll redirect back to the reading. Regarding assessments I feel that formal assessments pressure students to do well which in turn can lead to massive failure. I remember the terrible tests that were pressured on me not only when I was younger but also when I decided to go to college and become a teacher. Although I did well throughout school I still was very frustrated whenever I had to take formal assessments. I always battled between two answers and sometimes didn’t test well because of test anxiety. Even though I do give formal assessments in my classroom today I also give informal assessments to have a balance. I think multigenre writing would be a great way to continue balancing assessments.

Once again this text is wonderful in that it shows examples. I am such a visual person so it thrills me to see the many examples that correlate with the text in the book. I love how multigenre writing not only gives the writer options but it also makes the writer think about why he/she would choose the type of genre they were writing. I think this is a great skill that a lot of students lack. Some are unable to reason why. I also love the peer editing. I feel that this book as really shown how influential peer editing can actually be. I do peer editing in my classroom but feel that sometimes certain students will not really find mistakes when reading their neighbor’s paper or they will and won’t tell them because they don’t want to seem like a nerd. I’m finding that peer pressure rises in fourth grade.

Multigenre Project

Candace Hensley — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:57:31 +0000

I was thinking about our 4th grade curriculum and pondered the idea of doing pirates. However, I’ve been thinking of doing something that I could use with many different grades. I’m not exactly sure what grade level I will be in next year (this is always up in the air with ILTs and especially with me moving away). I would like to some day go down to the lower grades. I’m trying to think of things that overlap throughout grade levels. I’ve even thought about doing a project on our anoles (lizards) that we will be getting very soon. I really think I could tie animal adaptations to several grade levels. However, I think as long as I had an example students could do projects on any genre. I’m having quite a hard time narrowing these things down. I thought that no matter what I did I could paint a tote bag to go along with a scrapbook of the topic. Does anyone have any ideas for me? Here are some of the ideas I have…

*pirates (NC History)

*The Biltmore House (NC History…this seems like it would be such a cool project…we might be visiting it on a field trip @ Christmas )…I’m leaning more toward this one. There’s so many genres I could incorporate with The Biltmore House.

*I’ve also thought about a NC scrapbook since my grade level has decided not to do one. I could do historical buildings, famous people, battles fought, etc.

*anoles (lizards)…we are studying these a part of animal adaptations