Narrative Elements, Connections to Text

Well hello!  It’s been some time since I’ve posted an update here, so please accept my apologies.  A side effect of having easy access to the Chromebook laptops and the student Gmail accounts is the reality that I tend to do more of my communication with students through those means (such as emailing assignments and information), rather than posting messages here.  A reminder:  Parents should ALWAYS have the ability to log-in to their children’s APS gmail accounts.  If you need the username or password for your child, please let me know.

In recent weeks, we finished our first major reading unit, which focused on identifying and explaining the narrative elements in a text.  These elements, which we sometimes described  as being ingredients making up an ice cream sundae, represent the different parts of a narrative story.  While we did work in class on identifying these elements, I found (as I normally do) that this was a pretty straight-forward task for the students.  Instead, we focused more on supporting their responses with well-selected evidence from the text.  For example, if we wanted to describe the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood as being “sneaky,” we’d look to the text to find evidence that supports the opinion that the wolf is, in fact, sneaky.  This is a year-long focus, as kids need to support their responses with evidence in any number of situations, ranging from narrative elements to connections to predictions.  In fact, you may often see the same requests made on many math homework worksheets, on which kids need to support their reasons why they agree or disagree with an answer or how they solved a given math problem.  When your fourth grader brought home his or her literacy binder recently, you hopefully had the opportunity to review the character traits response to The Josefina Story Quilt, in which students planned their responses on a graphic organizer, wrote a draft response, and later revised their work based on my written feedback and an in-class review of how to craft a well-supported short-answer response.

We’re now starting to focus on making connections to text.  In class, we read a story called One Green Apple (a terrific story, if you’re not familiar with it), and you may remember a recent homework assignment in which students had to write about different connections they made to the text.  In class, we looked at the difference between a coincidental connection (I, too, have been to an apple orchard!) vs a deeper, more meaningful connection (I, too, have felt out of place when everyone around me spoke a different language than the one I spoke.)  Right now, we’re focusing on making connections to feelings.

Our work with One Green Apple will also kick off our author study of Eve Bunting, who has written so many wonderful texts about a variety of meaningful topics.  Her books often have many things to which kids can relate, while also introducing new concepts that are unfamiliar to many fourth graders.  She’s a top-notch author!

Once again, thank you for your patience in waiting for an update, and I’ll try to post more regularly in the new year.

Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss