Elementary ELP--What's Been Happening?

The 5th Grade ELP students and I would like to say a great big "Thank you" to all who participated in The Giving Tree project.  What a great way to build community connections.  The support was overwhelming!

The 3rd quarter is in full swing and I wanted to take a minute to share what ELP has been doing since Winter Break.  So here we go......

The 1st and 2nd grade students meet for ELP two times a week (hopefully, depends on weather and schedules).  Our focus has been on adding vocabulary to our reading and writing.  Over the past few weeks we have used a snowball/snowman theme to build synonyms into our repertoire.  We read aloud, "The Biggest Snowball Ever" and then created a "Blizzard of Synonyms" with hand-made snowflakes.  Pictures will be added later.....so, stay tuned. 

The 3rd grade students had been studying Native American tribes, their cultures and habitats for Social Studies.  To enhance the learning, we created a Native American folder and introduced the Iroquois, Tlingit and Sioux tribes.  Each tribe had an activity to go with it.  For example, for the Tlingit tribe (of the northwest coast) students created totem poles and wrote about how the animal characters represented a member of their family. 

The 4th and 5th grade students have been working on their 2nd set of pen pal letters and putting together choral readings to share for a Skype video chat with Mr. Searl's 4th grade class.  Mr. Searl's class is located in Bloomington, MN about 10 minutes from Mall of America.  In addition, the 4th graders finished "Sarah, Plain and Tall" and research about The Great Plains.  For 5th grade ELP, they read "Holes" by Louis Sachar and watched the accompanying DVD.  A culminating activity was to generate an original Bio-Poem about one of the characters in the book.
The following is an example by Nick Haynes:
Bio-Poem:
Armpit
fat, lazy, beast and boss
Related to ?
Cares about his Mom
Who feels tired
Who needs to lose some weight
Who gives a letter to his mom
Who fears buzzards
Who would like to see rain
Resident of Camp Green Lake
Theodore

For more information on the Bio-Poem and/or "Holes" find a 5th Grader or check out the book from our local library.....it's a great read!!

We hope this blog update has been helpful.

Mrs. C.


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