We connected with the 5th grade, and Kelly shared that it would benefit fourth graders to practice synthesizing information and paraphrasing.
We went through history and looked at what this project was during the Susan Faust Era.
We decided to go back to our roots and make it connected to California, as this is the Social Studies focus in 4th grade.
We decided that before we start the project, students need to learn about different time periods so they will understand the context in which their changemakers lived. We are planning a gallery walk with photos and information about different time periods in American/California history. We want students to learn about several time periods and then to focus on when their changemaker lived and what was happening in the state at that time.
We looked at the California Hall of Fame to see what changemakers they honored.
We then looked at our list and kept the Changemakers that were connected to CA, and added more from the CA Hall of Fame
We also looked to make sure we had enough windows and mirrors for our students. Due to the narrowing of the project (just California), we realized that certain stories were not going to be told. To rectify this issue, we are going to read these books as mentor texts, so our students can be exposed to a larger variety of stories. Diana is going to design a unit solely devoted to narrative nonfiction, i.e. picture book biographies
We looked to make sure each student had multiple resources to look at so they could read across texts and use both online and physical resources when possible (we started a spreadsheet to track this and will continue to fill it in when we meet again during the school year.
We researched graphic organizers and found some templates we liked; after some discussion we also realized we want student input on what to include on a graphic organizer
When talking about the final project, Simone was inspired by children’s video book reviews that were featured on the fantastic Reading Rainbow TV show. We are going to ask Fran, Jennepher, and possibly Jimmy about the most streamlined and child-friendly way to record students doing a similar video, but about their changemaker. We anticipate students beginning the video with a question or riddle to create audience buy-in, and then continuing with synthesizing salient information about their changemaker
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You two did a lot of great thinking about the integration of books and library skills into the 4th grade program and this will be exciting to see this year!