Finishing the Year Strong in 408

From Mr. McAuliffe and Mrs. Young’s 5^th Grade Class 

          Mr. McAuliffe’s and Mrs. Young’s class completed a HUGE author study on Patricia Polacco.  As a class, we read 34 of her picture books.  We designed an attribute chart made up of the books copyrights, main characters, settings, dedications, themes, foreign/ vivid language, and the illustrations.  We also created charts on the smart board that illustrated text-to-text, text-to-self, text-to-world connections, author’s purpose and summaries.  We charted our connections from her books in our ELA notebook.

          Each student wrote six different journal responses in their ELA notebook (they had a choice of 12 responses to choose from). Two of their six journal entries were typed an displayed as part of a bulletin board. As a class we had authentic discussions and noticed many shared attributes in her stories. Did you know her great-great-great grandfather shook Pres. Lincoln’s hand? Did you know as a child she struggled as a reader because she is dyslexic? Did you know she dedicated one of her books to Dr. Seuss?

 The culminating activity of our author study was the Patricia Polacco character perspective summary.  Every student chose a character from one of the many picture books we read.  Then each child wrote a 1-2 paragraph summary of the story from the perspective of a main character.