Junior Great BooksBriarwood E.L. students through fifth grade continue to enjoy the stories from Junior Great Books. The students read and discuss approximately one story each quarter. JGB stories are carefully selected for their interpretive qualities. A text opener is included to start the kids thinking, and then the teacher reads the story aloud to the students and gives them an opportunity to ask questions. Later students read the story silently and take notes. Then, as a group, the students discuss an interpretive question about the story—a question to which there may be more than one correct answer! Students learn to defend and support their answer with examples from the story. As we continue with Junior Great Books this year, we will be watching for the continuing development of critical thinking, reading comprehension, and speaking, listening, and writing skills.
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Spiders Briarwood second and third grade E.L. students just finished a unit on spiders. The students further developed their reading skills by practicing the "plan and label" strategy for expository reading. They explored a webquest about spiders and used Inspiration to make a web of spider facts they had learned. The students also used their creative skills to make a paper mache spider! You may see some of the finished spiders below. Click here to explore the webquest the students used. |
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French Plays (Spring 2005) Bonjour! The Wednesday and Friday classes worked very hard on several French plays. Wednesday students perfected their performance of “Boucle d’Or et les Trois Ours” (Goldilocks and the Three Bears). Friday’s class worked on three different plays: Group 1 performed “Boucle d’Or et Les Trois Ours”; Group 2 tried a play about a frog who wants to become a rock star entitled, “Louis La Grenouille”; and Group 3 worked hard on “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge” (Little Red Riding Hood). The students did very well picking up French phrases from the plays. The students also designed and created the scenery for the performances. This project has been educational, challenging and fun for the students! A bientôt!
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Animal Diaries (Fall 2004) The 2nd through 4th grade E.L. students started the 2004-05 school year with a fun and creative project that also focused on the development of research skills. After reading Diary of a Worm by Doreen Cronin, students chose an interesting animal to research and write a diary about. The students learned to create a web about a topic, organizing their facts into subtopics such as habitat, food, and enemies. Students found resources and took notes, then turned their information into interesting diary entries, writing as if they were those animals. Lastly, the students created illustrations and made final copies of their books. We had some outstanding results!
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Private Eye (Fall 2003) Briarwood E.L. students began the year with a unit called Private Eye. This interdisciplinary unit uses magnifying loupes to develop thinking skills and creativity. The students used the loupes to look at the world around them, studying objects from nature as well as their own skin, hands, and fingerprints. The magnification gave the students a different perspective and their observations led to analogies, which students then turned into poems. In a second activity, E.L. students learned how artists such as Georgia O’Keefe create works of art by looking more closely at the world around them. Using copies of their individual fingerprints and the loupes, students magnified one section of their fingerprint to create an abstract work of art. To conclude the unit, the students spent a day analyzing and classifying fingerprint patterns. They applied their knowledge to solve a mystery and determine which suspect could have robbed the safe and stolen company funds.
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It's on Me Thousands of scratches, round bumpy eyes, a rough wrinkly rhino sleeps on the sand. The dangerous savannah, a maze of spirals, ripples on the sand. What is it? My hand! -Tuesday E.L. Students |
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A Mystery! A very sharp and deadly mace, an umbrella used to shield your face. Sunflower seeds, many and small. A porcupine curled up in a ball. A spinning top shaped like a dome, an intricate sticky honeycomb. A steady cascading waterfall, a Christmas tree standing tall. What can it be? Why can't you see? It is not a stone or a bone--it's a prickly, tickly pine cone! -Thursday E.L. students
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