Discovering Our Voices

I hope all of my students and their families have had a great holiday!  I really enjoyed the chance to be with my daughter, who came home from Georgia where she’s working on her PhD, and my son, who lives in Ottawa where he works for the federal government, and of course the regulars around my place: my husband and mom.  I also got a chance to visit with extended family, eat lots of good food (made by my kids), play with my great-nephew and great-niece, catch up on family news, read lots of books, cook, shop, watch TV and movies, play games, learn some yoga from my daughter, and just enjoy a different pace in life (that means I slept in until almost 8:30 a.m. every day!).

It’s kind of hard to believe that we’ve been back to school for two weeks now! That’s probably because we haven’t really been back for two whole weeks.  Three snow days in the first week back made it kind of difficult to get back in the swing of things.  Hopefully, we’ll have a ‘real’ week this coming week because I’m pretty pumped for some of the new concepts, projects, and skills we’ll be learning in the next few months!  Here’s a snapshot of what’s coming!

In Grade 8, we’ve just started working on our Listening Strategies Unit, and I know that students are going to love listening to the podcast I found last summer (when I do a lot of my research and lesson planning) called SHABAM!  I chose SHABAM! because it involves a narrative (story) about a theoretical Zombie Apocalypse!  Who doesn’t love Zombies, right?  But the 9 episodes for Season 1 are more than just a story about a family dealing with a Zombie apocalypse.  It’s also a very informative science podcast.  As we listen, we’ll learn about the brain, cells, epidemics, history, the way science works, digital communication/technology, water, food, and the list goes on!  Another reason why I chose SHABAM! is because it’s so entertaining!  The production quality and use of music, jokes, different types of voices, experts in a variety of science fields, etc. is INCREDIBLE!  We’ve only listened to one episode so far, but I hope that we can listen to one per week adding new listening strategies each time, because listening well requires skill.  We’re going to be learning and experimenting with different strategies to help us:

• focus
• remember
• record
• paraphrase
• summarize

The strategies we will use will involve focussing our attention by doing something during the listening.  Active listening can include: note-taking, drawing, re-listening, and stopping to talk and ask questions, make connections, infer, and paraphrase.

 

Also in Grade 8, we’ve started a unit on strategies for reading and understanding nonfiction text.  Reading nonfiction is very different from reading narratives.  The structure of a narrative – even one that jumps back and forth through time – is time sequenced.  Story structure is something we’re very familiar with because, well, life is a story, right?  First we did this, then we did that, and here’s how it all turned out!

Nonfiction, on the other hand can be challenging for several reasons.  The structures of nonfiction can vary.  Five text structures used in nonfiction text are: cause-effect, description, problem-solution, compare-contrast, and sequence.  We haven’t watched this video yet in class, but we will!

 

So far, our learning goal: to read and fully comprehend complex nonfiction text, and a related learning goal: to read and summarize a nonfiction article, we’ve read an article entitled “How long does it take to form a habit?” using several reading strategies to better understand the article and summarize the key points.  The strategies we practiced include:

• rereading
• paraphrasing
• identifying important words to highlight
• vocabulary skills (breaking words into parts, using a dictionary, using the context of a sentence to understand the meaning of unfamiliar words)
• summarizing each paragraph or section with one sentence

 

We are presently working on understanding an article entitled “All the cells in the human body” which is a very challenging read since we know very little about cells in general (no background knowledge makes reading even more challenging). We use the following strategy on Thursday of last week.

 

 

In grade 7, we are working on our Book Talks!  Each student has chosen a favourite book that they read in our class this year to tell the class about in a brief 2-4 minute Book Talk.  Students have a set of guidelines to follow that include all of the information their Book Talk should include:

• title
• author
• genre
• number of pages in the book
• how they chose the book to read
• a brief summary of the book (no giving away the ending)
• what they liked about the book
• who they’d recommend it to

Before we began our planning, we watched two videos that showcased a) a BAD Book Talk and b) a GOOD Book Talk!

We discussed the two videos – what went wrong in the BAD example and what was good about the GOOD example, so that we’d have a fair idea of what we needed to do in our presentations.

We are hoping to be ready to present later this week.  While we listen to other students talk about their favourite books, we’ll make a TO-READ list of ones that sound particularly interesting.  Each student will, of course, find different books most interesting to them.

Grade 7 students have just finished up their news articles, and we’ll be ready to do some nonfiction reading and writing in the coming weeks also!  Nonfiction reading in grade 7 will involve some short pieces, like news articles, but also some nonfiction books!

These are just a few of the books we’ll be reading in 7th grade in the coming weeks.  Students will form nonfiction literature circles so that they can read, summarize, and discuss the ideas they’re reading about!

 

 

 

 

 

Stay tuned to hear about how things are going with our nonfiction reading!  In the meantime, please take some time to read our blogposts!  Students have been writing and blogging on a variety of topics that interest them!  Don’t forget –

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