Rosie the Riveter Returns!

I noticed something interesting on my favorite nonfiction reading site for kids. Newsela.com is a great website that contains many current news articles written for students. When you click on the left of the site you can change the Lexile level of the article. A lower Lexile level will be easier to read and a higher level will be more difficult, probably on a middle school level. On Newsela I found this great article, The Original Rosie the Riveter had the Right Name for the Job! The article discusses the same Rosie we learned about in Andrea Beaty’s book, Rosie Revere Engineer! Take a few minutes to read and enjoy this article. Adjust the Lexile level on the left if the text seems too difficult or simple!


Here’s one of our favorite pages from Rosie Revere Engineer! (If you want to learn about powerful, smart women then check out this book!)

What to read next?

Today, we finished our amazing read aloud The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane! We loved it! We were so happy with the ending! Thank you Kate DiCamillo for sharing your wonderful writing with us.

We decided we’d like to read some more of Ms. DiCamillo’s work. We are going to vote between The Tiger Rising and The Tale of Despereaux. Check out these fantastic, student made book trailers and then cast your votes soon!

The Tiger Rising

The Tale of Despereaux

Back to Fiction!

We have enjoyed some amazing nonfiction books this school year (hey, there’s one of our prefixes, “non” means not!) We read The Interactive Biography of Martin Luther King Jr., Different Like Coco, and The Tree Lady. We’ve also read a plethora of books on all sorts of nonfiction topics, from porcupines to escape artists!

On Monday, we began our new read aloud book The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, by Kate DiCamillo. This is one of my favorite books and it holds a special place in my heart. Every time I read this book to my students, they point out something new and interesting about the characters. You all did a marvelous job of quickly realizing that Edward is a selfish rabbit. We said he has a big ego!

Here is a sneak peek into our new read aloud. What predictions can you make based on the movie? Leave your predictions in a comment!

 

Snow Days

This week one of our favorite books, Snow Day by Lester Laminack, came to life in our city! We have had two days off to play in the snow and enjoy the chilly weather. I’m excited to see you all back at school tomorrow!

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Icicles hang from a teacher’s car.

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The outside hallways were filled with snow!

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All the snow is melting on the playground!

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Snow remains in all the shadows because the sun has not melted it yet!

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The front entrance of our school was covered in snow!

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A church in the Southend of Charlotte was covered in snow!

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Each swing was covered in snow!

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Look how deep the snow was! It covered Mrs. Felter’s boots!

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Even puppies left tracks in the snow.

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The light rail tracks leading to Uptown were under snow!

Happy Birthday Dr. King!

Yesterday, we finished reading the interactive e-biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and today, January 15th, is Dr. King’s birthday! Our interactive biography contained the entire “I Have a Dream” speech that Dr. King gave in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. We have been badly wanting to hear the speech, so here are some of the greatest highlights from Dr. King’s speech.

Bullfrog Background Knowledge

We have been loving Barbara O’Connor’s awesome book The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester. In order to better understand this book we realized that we needed to develop some schema, or background knowledge, about the main subjects in the books. Yesterday, we researched submarines. Today, we need to learn more about one of the main characters in the book Tooley Graham! Since Tooley is a bullfrog, here is some wonderful bullfrog information!