Viewing: Josefina Story Quilt
October 22, 2017
What are we reading?
Hello, families! I apologize for the long stretch since I’ve gotten to touch base with you. I try to post an update every few weeks, but it seems like things at PGS are getting busier and busier. Please know that if you’re not hearing from me for a while, it’s not a lack of interest or concern, but rather, I’m trying to tackle things that are time sensitive. Planning instruction, reviewing student work, emailing or calling families, and meeting with coworkers are all things that can push website posts to the back burner. But I will do my very best to keep on top of this as well.
On to the updates! In reading, we have been focusing on narrative elements, which are the parts of a story. Sound repetitive? Your fourth grader has probably learned this every year since kindergarten! But each year, we get a bit more in-depth. Narrative elements are: setting, characters, problems, solutions, and main events. With this focus, we also learn about theme, summaries, and retellings. We started with a study of character traits, and this past week, we really immersed ourselves in a study of setting. Hopefully your child asked you about setting last week, because while many of us adults correctly identify setting as WHERE the story takes place, we often forget that setting is also WHEN a story takes place. To focus on character and setting, we’ve read four wonderful books: The Purple Coat is a great book about a girl who desperately wants a purple coat, instead of her usual navy coat. This was one of my most beloved books when I was young, and I’m glad to share it with the students! (I told the kids that this was my absolute favorite book, but I’ve already said that about a few different titles, so I think they’re on to me.) We searched for evidence in the text to find where and when the story took place, and we used color-coded highlighting tape to organize the evidence. In fourth grade, a big focus is not just finding textual evidence (also often referred to as textual support) to prove one’s point of view, but in choosing the most valuable examples to highlight one’s argument. In the case of The Purple Coat, there was ample evidence to show when and where the story took place, so we were able to work on how to be selective. 
We have also read Melissa Parkington’s Beautiful, Beautiful Hair, which, while not on my list of favorite books, is an outstanding story about a girl who wants to be known for something she does, not just for her lovely hair. This was a great means for us to focus on character traits, and as we learned more about Melissa Parkington, we were able to identify and support our opinions about her character traits.
You may have seen The Josefina Story Quilt come home a few weeks ago. It’s a bit basic for most fourth graders, but that allows us to focus on interpreting the story, rather than on decoding hard works and understanding the language in the text. It’s a great story about the trials and tribulations of a family traveling west to California in a covered wagon. This text has it all, and students have been working with partnerships to practice writing short answer responses about the various narrative elements. We review these responses as a class so they can see first-hand examples of what a strong response “looks like” and so they can have more practice with writing a clear, well supported response to text.
Finally, students have independently read A Chair for My Mother. This book definitely falls on my favorite books list, and it might fall pretty close to the top. It’s about a girl whose family has to rebuild their life after their home burns down in a fire. It may sound unsettling from my quick summary, but it is a genuinely heartwarming text. (Another favorite from my childhood. Who reading this was a Reading Rainbow child growing up? Butterfly in the sky…) This is our “assessment” text, meaning that students are writing their own short-answer responses about the narrative elements in this text. I’ve given you a link to the book above, but as I’m using this as an assessment tool, I appreciate your willingness to let your students work through the story themselves, without benefitting from your expert interpretation of the text. I’ll let you know once we’re done using this text (probably close to conferences), and you’ll be free to enjoy it as a family (though I fear that your fourth grader might be tired of it by then).
Coming soon: Updates on math, science, social studies, and targeted instruction!
Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss
December 22, 2014
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