We had the most amazing day writing in the rain on the day the typhoon came through. We were perched under the eaves watching the trees bend and the drops of rain fly off of the eaves. It was a great beginning to our poetry unit. We used to study poetry in January, but we changed our schedule last year to bring the Poetry Reading into the fall. There were too many events lined up in the winter. This has worked out well, except...
I love to take the students outside in inclimate weather to write. October and November are usually dry and warm. It's not quite as inspiring as a good old storm. Alas, Mother Nature provided an extraordinary day for us! Our journals were a bit wet, but it was worth it. Ask to see your students' rainy day poems!

And so begins our poetry unit. Get ready for November 11th when each student will present an original piece. It's my favorite event of the year. Yes, I'm biased. Enough said. This week we will be writing all kinds of free verse poetry. Even my most reluctant students, those who profess disdain for poetry, seem to be enjoying themselves. It's all about choice, choice to write about what they want. I suspect we will have a number of clever and humorous poems presented during our poetry reading. Stay tuned.

Have you heard any interesting words floating around lately? This week we worked on the Morning Vocabulary words by using a great website called quizlet.com. The site offers many opportunities for students to practice, learn, and absorb vocabulary words. There are also a few games that engage the students. We used the site on the SMART Board this week. Who thought vocabulary could be fun???

We also worked on "Trash and Treasure" reading. Students learned to mine the treasures, the important words, from articles using highlighters and annotation. Then they used those gems to write summaries. We then compared these factual summaries to our previous reading responses which were opinion based.

We ended the week with some great "like your hair is on fire" reading of independent books. There is no better way to end a productive week!