Text to Text Connection Hunt

Various texts were scattered around the room today and the students went on a hunt to read through the texts and make connections.  

Mia was able to make connections between three of the texts: Ask Eddie, First Airplane Trip, and Rock Band.  In each text something was happening for the first time.

Here's Ali's connection between When Sophie Gets Angry - Really, Really Angry... and Brother or Pest?:

Here's Joanna's connection between Kate's Birthday and The Little White Lie.  She also made a connection between Brother or Pest? and When Sophie Gets Angry - Really, Really, Angry...

Making connections between texts wasn't easy!  Check out the students working hard!

Monster Match - Descriptive Writing

The students are super excited about their writing this week!  They drew a monster and now they are working on coming up with descriptive language to describe their monster.  Later this week they will use all the ideas they came up with today to write a descriptive paragraph about their monster.  Next week, the monsters will be hanging around the room and the students will have the opportunity to walk around and match the descriptive paragraph with the correct monster.  We'll let you know when they are ready so you can come in and check them out too!

Here's my monster.

Here are the ideas our class came up with to describe him on our graphic organiser.  We tried to include size, colour, shape, texture, and character traits in our descriptions.

I didn't include the pictures of the monsters because I don't want to ruin the monster match day, but here are some students' graphic organisers.  They're coming up with some great descriptions and they're really proud of their work!

Different Ways We Use Water

We brainstormed all the different ways we use water, our toanga.  I was impressed by all the different ideas the students had.  The students separated the ways they use water into three categories: everyday, often, and sometimes.

Here we are brainstorming:

We couldn't believe all the different things that we use water for in our lives.  Here's the list of ways we use water that we came up with as a class:

See if you can think of any other ways we use water!

Text to Text Connections

Today we learnt more about text to text connections.  We know that as we read a story we can make a connection to another story we've read.  Today we reread Grumpy Nicola and then read When Sophie Gets Angry - Really, Really Angry... As we read we asked ourselves:

• What does this remind me of in another book I've read?
• Have I read something like this before?
• Do the characters in the story remind me of characters from another story?
• Does the setting in the story remind me of the setting in another story?

We made text to text connections between Grumpy Nicola and When Sophie Gets Angry - Really, Really Angry... Some students were even able to make a text to text connection between one of the books we read in class and another book they've read on their own.

Here are our connections:

When Sophie's angry in Sophie Gets Angry reminds me of when Harry gets angry in Harry Potter.

When Sophie Gets Angry - Really, Really Angry... reminds me of The Forever Whale because the sisters both fight.

When Sophie gets angry reminds me of Nicola getting grumpy.

When Sophie Gets Angry - Really, Really Angry... reminds me of Grupmy Nicola because they are both happy at the end.

When Sophie Gets Angry - Really, Really Angry... reminds me of Grumpy Nicola because they were both unhappy. 

When Sophie and Nicola got very angry in both books they both wanted to be alone.