Writing, Reading, and Oral Communication explorations

Writing

This is a post from a lesson done a number of weeks ago at Nelson Mandela.  Ms. Owen's 5/6 class embarked on a narrative writing project.  To start things off, we listened to a copy of The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and aimed to match parts of the text with some of the traditional portions of a narrative framework.

The annotations on the photocopied pages from the book were an attempt to have the students interact with book and develop some reading strategies.  actual photocopies of the

Eventually, Ms. Owen placed the definitions up on the wall in the typical plot line that students off see:

The Success Criteria for the assignment was posted on the class Google Classroom page but we (Ms. Owen and I) decided to make this more visible for the students:

One of the problems, though, with narrative writing is the great potential for it to become overwhelming for the student if it is not contained properly.  I read a number of the drafts of what the students did and they seemed to veer off the plotline with too many details that do not relate to the key components of a narrative or the criteria outlined on the Success Criteria chart.

I will check in with the Teacher in the new year to see how she felt about the final copies handed in by the Students.  I am going to spend some time thinking about a more efficient and engaging way to look at this genre of Writing.

Round Table:  Reading and Oral Communication

This post was written with one Round Table exercise complete and three classes in the middle of completing another one relating to Masculinity, Boyhood, and Gender.

In Ms. Jimenez's class at Queen Victoria, we used the following news item as our "text" to study.  It is also important to note that this topic to be explored came from the class; in other words, it was of interest and relevance to them.

The original article was from here.  

The following questions are meant to be guiding questions for the class.  By no means is the discussion limited to the information related to these questions, but they help get the discussion going.

When students are having some difficulties talking in the circle or coming up with ideas, the following prompts are available:

The two large slides are from TDSB lessons relating to the Round Table exercise.  I am not sure who the original authors are.

This will be explored more in the new year (2020).
Enjoy the rest of 2019 and have a superb start to 2020.