Meet Tr. Meg and learn about our Famous African American projects

Please help me welcome Tr. Meg to our classroom!  She is our new student teacher and will be with us for the next twelve weeks.  Tr. Meg grew up in Princeton, NJ.  She is a senior at Bryn Mawr College and is working towards getting her teaching certificate through Swarthmore College. Already she is a great addition to our class!

Today Tr. Meg taught us a mini lesson on how to add details to our informational writing pieces. She noticed that students were having trouble taking a fact from a book and adding it in a purposeful way to their writing.  Tr. Meg decided to write an informational piece about herself demonstrating how to take facts and turn them into interesting paragraphs.

We started the beginning of this writing project in the beginning of January when we began a unit on Famous African Americans.  We spent several weeks learning about the history of African Americans in our country.  We went back to Jamestown, VA in 1619 and worked our way up to the Civil Rights movement in the 1950's and 1960's.

Before we began writing for this project, we studied several informational articles and discussed how the writers wrote them.  We noticed that the authors used photos and captions to highlight important parts of their writing, time lines, a question and answer format, exciting headers and details, and even little cartoon characters to make the key information easier to understand.

About two weeks ago we chose famous African Americans to research and write about.  After doing the research, we spent the past few days envisioning how to use the writers' techniques we observed to make our research easy to understand and have the impact we want.  Yesterday, many of us began writing our first drafts and will soon be asking peers to edit them.

The next step will be to re-envision our informational articles. We will use our edits, look one more time at our work, and ask ourselves, "|s this my vision for my finished piece?"  When the piece becomes what we have envisioned, we will begin working on our final copy.

Tomorrow we will summarize our research and prepare what we are going to say at the mock Wax Museum.  On Friday we will dressed up as the famous African American person that we researched and share our knowledge with others.  It continues to be an exciting and inspiring process!

I am looking forward to seeing you in the classroom 

this Friday at 8:30 am!

A big thank you to the Soup Wednesday contributors! 

It has been a delicious success.  

The children look forward to your warm, tasty soups.