Proving What We Have Learned

Okay, so I know the blog has been a bit silent this week, but we have been busy with learning.  After learning about story maps, we looked at point of view summaries.  We took a text, and broke it down into a RAFT.  RAFT stand for role, audience, format, topic  (ask your student and see if they know this.)  After we sorted elements of the fiction story into the raft, we were able to write a summary of the story from a different perspective.  As we wrote that, we had to be careful that we stayed on topic and focused on the details of the text.  By doing this, we had to really look close at the piece so that we gave an accurate summary.  This was challenging, but fun because we got to pretend to be someone else and try to think like them. 

Today we put all of these skills to the test.  Mrs. Benson read the story, Seventh Grade by Gary Soto, and we had to choose one of the summarization strategies we learned to summarize the story with.  After we wrote our own summary, we answered a multiple choice question that required us to choose the BEST summary of the story.  We did so much better than last time.  We were able to separate ourselves from the story, even though we made lots of connections to it.  We still struggled between one of two answers, but we had very intelligent and well thought out arguments about why one or the other was right.  This was a sign of true learning! 
 I am so proud of our budding bloggers.  Be sure to read about George and his adventures in reading and Calah and the best friend she misses, Bradley and his dreams for his future and Camille with her tribute shout out to a musician she admires.  They are all independent assignments.  None of this work was assigned to them!  That is what learning is all about.

Read 30 minutes--Book orders due September 16th (don't forget you can order online or by check).