Mother Goose Point of View

I was amazed to find out that the kids in my 5th grade reading group had never been introduced to the term, point of view. At least they said that they hadn't heard of it anyway. For whatever reason, I'm just now getting into creating anchor charts. All those years, all I had to do was to go to a teacher store and buy a poster to hang up when I needed it. I didn't really see the power of creating my own charts until I started reading the Daily 5 strategies. I visit quite frequently Jen's blog at http://rundesroom.blogspot.com/ , to see some of the great looking anchor charts that she is making.

Now, I just need some way to keep record of them so that the next time we need to create one, I can refer back to what was done before. For the time being, I've taken to taking pictures of them. So with that said, I created an anchor chart over point of view in class. The thing I like about them is that the students help create them. 

Here is part of our anchor chart that we use to learn and think about Point of View. The students are always walking over and looking at it more closely. We also have a list of Criteria on the other half of the board that the students and I created to ensure our success in this topic.
To help us practice writing from another point of view, I had seen on another teacher's blog that they used Nursery Rhymes to write form a point of view. As a teacher, I am very good at begging, borrowing, and using ideas from other teachers. Unfortunately, I can't for the life of me find the initial blog post that I had seen the idea from, because I would love to give that great teacher credit. (If anyone knows, please forward that information to me so I can give that person some props).
The jest of the task is that students continue a Mother Goose Nursery rhyme from the point of view of either one of the characters or someone who was a bystander witnessing the event. All in all, they turned out pretty good.

Check out our Point of View blog posts at: http://kidblog.org/boyersbloggers11. Please feel free to leave a comment, the students love getting comments from other teachers and students from other classrooms.

So far, the hardest thing for us to understand, find, and practice is reading different views of the same event. Any suggestions and advice would be great.

Text Structures in the Outback

We are gearing up for our Family Reading Night. Our school hosts two Family Reading Nights each year. Our reading night attempts have gone through many different changes over the past few years. Our first one started out as just an opportunity for parents to come and read together. We had brought in pillow, couches, comfy chairs, rugs, etc into our multipurpose room and just let families spread out and read. It went well, but was lacking what we really wanted to achieve - a chance for parents to see what their kids are doing in reading class.
We have continued to evolve since that point and are going through with our latest attempt this week. This Family Reading Night will be a themed "Travel Around the World" for families. Each grade level is a continent and will be hosting reading activities that pertain to their respective continents. Reading classrooms have spent some time reading and researching about their appointed continent.
Some reading groups have volunteered to host special projects or presentations for families as well such as reader's theater, living museum, games, etc. Each classroom was expected to have something to display for parents to see.
Fortunately, for my 5th graders, we were assigned the continent of Australia. G'Day Mates! Since we have been working with text structures in our reading group, the thought came to mind to have my readers research an Australian topic and publish their findings using a specific text structure. Identifying text structures has been a very difficult standard for us to master this year, and my feeling was that perhaps it might be easier to identify if they actually had to write something following a certain text structure format.
Having a higher level group of readers, this presented quite a challenge for them. I gave each pair of students a text structure to work with. The hard part for them, was to think of a topic that would be appropriate for their assigned text structure (they found sequence to be the hardest).
I provided students with what we call our Text Structure Frame to give them some sort of direction to put their thoughts together. I was actually impressed with some of the topics that the students chose to write their papers about. The topics ranged from comparing Dingos and Wolves and the steps to throwing a boomerang to the effects of feral cats on Australian wildlife and the environmental threats to the Great Barrier Reef.
Our great text structure passages will be displayed proudly around some Australian wildlife in the hallway. Cheerio, Toodle-oo, and Hooroo for now!
By the way, our classroom is hosting a blogging activity with families. The blog we are creating can be found here:  http://kidblog.org/FamilyReadingNight/ if you'd like to visit.

Text Structure Frames