You are Invited...

It's almost that time!  We have been spending LOTS of time in class - in all areas - working on getting our Wax Museum project ready to go.  This week we planned our costumes by looking at pictures of our famous Americans.  We talked about what we would need to look like that person and what each person would be holding or have near them to represent what they had accomplished.

We are also creating an INTERACTIVE  timeline of famous Americans in PowerPoint.  Each timeline point will be a hotspot and when you click on the spot, it will pull up a video (of the student in costume!) telling about that person.

In order to do this we had to practice making a video - that was fun!  We did a practice run and had one person hold the ipad while videotaping someone else talking about themselves.  We watched the videos together and learned A LOT about how to make a good video.  We created our "Top Ten Tips" and posted them on the whiteboard the next day, before we tried again.

Our videos were MUCH better the second time around!  Next week we'll spend time writing our quick informational speeches for both or wax museum and our videos.

If you didn't get the invitation to visit our Wax Museum (sent in Friday folders this week), here's the information:

NOTE:  The Wax Museum is the project Ms. Gamache's readers are doing.  If your child is part of Mrs. Dunn or Miss Carta's reading or writing classes, they have a different project planned :-)

Visitors to the Wax Museum will be treated to an interactive display of famous Americans throughout history that come alive with the touch of a button.  We hope you can join us!

Biographies - Part 1

What do you know about Jackie Robinson?  Amelia Earhart?  Have you heard of Ruth Law?  Or Thurgood Marshall?  These are just some of the famous Americans we've been learning about and boy are we excited!

We've been spending our reading time focusing on biographies, specifically talking about personality traits (character traits) and how the person responds (or responded) to challenges. 

 

After reading a few biographies about famous Americans, we generated ideas for some describing character traits.  We also learned some new words we could use to describe many of the people we were learning about.



We went back to the texts to find things the men and women said and did that supported our ideas.

We worked on locating key details by color coding texts and looking carefully at the illustrations and in the text.

We "walked the room" reading fact cards and finding main idea and details.

And we did some online research, too!

We learned SO much about so many people and can't wait for Part 2 - a fun biography project we'll be starting next week! Stay tuned!