My school has adopted "The Seven Habits of Happy Kids" as a model for how we can be more successful individually and as a school. The Children focus on a different habit each month. One of my favorites is the habit "Synergize" which means working together as a team, because "together is better". I felt like our little PLC team synergized to come up with possible project ideas. It was quite challenging to come up with a topic and writing area that accommodated all of us, because besides dealing with the difference in districts and order of teaching specific standards...I threw the different grade level into the loop. We found areas of overlap and an idea that was broad enough for all of us to use with our varying dynamics.
We decided to focus on explorers and narrative writing. For my fourth graders, we will using writing application 2.1 (writing narratives) and social studies standard 4.2 (describing the social, political, cultural, and economic life among European explorers landing in California.
More specifically, my students will use resources including books, articles, websites, and a field trip experience to build background knowledge to write a first person narrative in the perspective of a California explorer's journey. They will be challenged to use "SPEC" in their writing.
I appreciated the ideas and insights of my team and look forward to sharing results!
It was challenging for us to find something that would work across our different classrooms, but after completing the project, I was really pleased that we revisited narrative writing through the perspectives of explorers. It gave my students another chance to work on descriptive writing and the narrative genre, and they made some strong gains in the area. I'm really interested in that book your school is focusing on. I think I'm going to start reading it!
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