Summer Writing

Hello writers!

I hope you are all having a wonderful summer so far. In this post, I'd like to find out who has begun writing at home already. In the comments section, please tell us:

What have you been writing?

Where have you been writing?

Who have you shared your writing with?



If you would like to share your writing on this blog anytime this summer, you can email me your pieces at emilyellen24@gmail.com!

Writing our Memoirs

A writer named Gore Vidal said that, "a memoir is how one remembers one's own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked."

Do you agree? What do you see as the difference between a biography or autobiography, and a memoir?

Powerful Ideas in Tiny Packages

For our Poetry Author Celebration, Portable 2 writers decided to publish in a brand new way! We knew that we wanted our poetry to reach as large an audience as possible, so there were a few steps to our publishing.

First, we created posters to highlight our favorite poems. We spent time making the posters bright and attractive to catch as many eyes as possible, while still spotlighting our important words!

Then, we created a movie of our poems. Please watch it below and leave your comments!

Finally, we put up our poetry posters all over Grand Ridge Elementary. Our intent was to fill our school with our strong words and feelings, to share our love of writing with everyone! Our posters will stay up until our final Author Celebration of the year, when we will take them home along with our writing portfolios.

Enjoy!

*Note: I apologize in advance for the audio. This was our first experiment with the Flip Camera, and upon reflection we probably should have borrowed a microphone from someone!

Powerful Poetry

This week our class began writing free-verse poetry. Here are a few of the poems students in our class have already created.


Please leave questions and compliments in the comments!

Creating our Thesis Statements

Writers, today you tested your possible thesis statements by asking these questions:

1. Is this an arguable statement, rather than a fact?
2. Is this statement true for the beginning and the end of the story?
3. Can I support this statement with evidence from the text?

My thesis statement is:

Gabriel is a lonely boy who lets a kitten into his life and then isn't lonely anymore.

What are some of your thesis statements?

Feel free to comment on the thesis statements of others as well!

Just For Fun...

Mrs. Perry showed me this fun website where you can turn photos into shape collages. Just for fun, I turned photos from our October Author Celebration into a collage. Click on it to enlarge. What do you think, writers? :)

Cooperative Strip Paragraphs

Cooperative Strip Paragraph is a GLAD strategy that our class uses when writing expository text about a unit we are studying. As a class, we create a Process Grid, a graphic organizer that sorts information about our general topic (Native American tribes of the PNW) into categories (Location, Social Life, etc.)

Here is the Process Grid we created for this unit (click to enlarge):

Next, we use information from the Process Grid to create sentences that can be grouped into a paragraph. We do this as a class first, with each table group creating one sentence to contribute to the class paragraph (the Cooperative Strip Paragraph). As a class we then revise and edit our paragraph, until it is perfect.

Here is the Cooperative Strip Paragraph we created:

Our final step in this unit was for each table group to create their own Cooperative Strip Paragraph, using the exact same process on a group scale.

Here is the blue table group's paragraph:

Some students took on an additional challenge and created individual paragraphs using this process. In fourth grade, students learn to create several paragraphs in this way and eventually write five-paragraph essays about what they are studying!