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Character Analysis 

10/29/2016

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We are continuing to learn comprehension strategies of good readers. This week we started our unit of character analysis in reading. Our main goals these next few weeks are to:
  • Analyze characters though their actions, words, thoughts, and feelings.
  • Visualize to deepen understanding of characters.
  • Use sentence frames to discuss strategies in our stories.  
We will be looking at characters in our stories,  a character can be a person, animal, or thing. We will be examining a character's actions, feelings, thoughts, word, and what others say and think about him or her. This will allow us to make inferences on the type of character we are reading about. This will help us better understanding characters in a story which helps your reader better understand the story.

We will be responding to our stories using sentence frames that help us explain our thinking. Here are a few formats that we will be using:
  • The character feels ______.
  • I can tell he/ she feels this way because ________.
  • I can see the main character in my mind. What I see is ____.
  • The clues that helped me visualize include _____.

Whenever we are reading a story and
describing a character's actions, feelings, thoughts and words we also go back into the story and finding evidence to support  our reasoning. This allows us to go deeper into the stories and prove our thinking . 

You can help at home by reading stories and asking some of these questions as well.
  • How did the character feel at the beginning, middle and end of the story? What in the story tells you that?
  • What words would you use to describe the character? What in the story proves that?

This week we focused more on our own character traits and how we act when we are upset, happy, sad etc. We discussed traits that were inside and outside traits for a character and made this anchor chart to help us remember 


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We made character trait capes of ourselves so they had a better idea of what we were actually looking for within our stories. They did an excellent job of coming up with their own outside and inside character traits.
We started to dive into stories at the end of the week. We read, The legend of Spookley the Square Pumpkin, by Joe Trioano. This story is about a sweet, but different pumpkin. Spookley is teased by his round pumpkin friends until a stormy night when he saves the day! Below is the story and our chart of character traits that we discussed after we read the story. Next week we will continue with, The Three Billy Goats Gruff and No, David!
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A Growth Mindset

10/6/2016

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This week we started to focus on our yearlong learning of a growth mindset. As a society we used to think that our intelligence was fixed, meaning we were either smart or we weren’t. Scientists have proven again and again that it is simply not true. Our brain acts like a muscle, the more we use it, the stronger and smarter our brain becomes. Here are the handouts I sent home via our newsletter.

We read, Giraffes Can’t Dance, and we discussed what Gerald was not good at.  He was not good at dancing. We brainstormed a list of things we were not good at yet. Below is the brainstorm list that we came up with for what we cannot do. 
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Everyone then went back and wrote something that they could not do in first grade. We added something that they can do that is a prerequisite skill to help reach their goal. We discussed we can grow our brains and become good at whatever goal we set our mind to, with hard work. We also talked about how getting to our goal might be difficult,  but we are learning and growing when we do that. We discussed that with hard work we will continue to grow our brains and meet our goal that we are not good at YET.
 
Everyone worked really hard was proud of his or her goals. We hope you enjoy them!
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    Welcome to our First Grade class!  We are learning so many new things, follow along to enjoy the journey with us.

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  • Home
  • Students
    • Online Read Alouds
  • Parents
    • Our Daily Schedule
    • First Grade Standards
    • Homework
    • No Excuse Sight Words
    • Tips to Help Your First Grader
    • Math Help
  • Blog
  • About Me
  • Kaler Elementary
  • South Portland School District