SMART+Girls

Reflections: It was perfect ..... ok, maybe not perfect, lets see ....

Overall we were impressed with the level of learning/understanding for every student as demonstrated by the completed paragraphs. During "on the carpet" brainstorming the students turned to their "elbow partners" but we did not have the partners share their ideas at that time. Could have. Without planning specifically for the sharing of ideas with table groupings, the students took it upon themselves to share, trade and inspire ideas with each other as they completed their "Why Winter is the Best Season" graphic organizer.

The comments about incorporating Smart Ideas to this lesson and taking the focus away from pencil and paper ideas, is a terrific idea for followup lessons. That idea requires instruction on how to use Smart Ideas, and to have access to computers for the students. It is certainly an idea we should work in, for the future.

We had some great suggestions for extension activities: letting students take their paragraph writing to the next level by creating a "whopper" or "papa burger" by increasing the quantity and complexity of their supporting details; make their own word chef video.

We were pleasantly surprised to see how well the lesson reinforced the ideas of linking words. Without spending a lot of time reviewing them, students were incorporating them into their independent writing.

The Writer's Checklist was an excellent tool for inspiring everyone to complete the work, as well as give those who finish ahead to have a focused activity. It is easily adaptable to other subjects, and French, and easy for the children to use. The format in the lesson was to have the students move a happy face into the chart but we changed this to erasing the box to reveal a happy face to keep the page on the screen and eliminate scrolling. We need to find an easy and efficient way to "reset" the page after each student (not just hit the undo button several times) [suggestions????] Brenda suggested making multiple copies of the page so the children can complete one at a time and arrow on.

We had preread the book Fall is Here and I Love it by Elaine Good. We did a modelled lesson on writing about Fall and the students wrote about Winter. You could change the seasons, obviously...Winter/ Spring,...Spring/ Summer

File with most lesson components included.

The SMART girl team- Maryanne Randall, Tracy Muller, Maria McKinnon and Sarah-JaneOlszewski.

 For reference: http://www.eduplace.com/graphicorganizer/pdf/sandwich.pdf - sandwich template http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekE5Z-Sjh1k - word chef video http://www.alder.k12.oh.us/metadot/index.pl?id=3755&isa=Category&op=show - links to powerpoint presentation and rubric http://www.tustin.k12.ca.us/cyberseminar/paragraph.htm - how to write an orange  

Here's the Winter graphic organizer. 