Comic Books

Our final project in our Wampanoag unit was to create a comic book depicting a Wampanoag person and how he or she felt about the arrival of the Pilgrims.

  To make these comic strips, students had to first learn about the historical events, then make an opinion about whether the Pilgrims had more positive or more negative effects on the Wampanoags, choose strong emotion words (using a thesaurus), and write a paragraph.  Then they had to learn the comic book app and choose one strong sentence from their paragraph to use in the final piece.  They also had a chance to critique each other's comic books.

What we've learned about the Wampanoags

We are finishing up our unit on the Wampanoags and how they were affected by the arrival of the Pilgrims.  Throughout this unit we've been reading and writing and discussing.  We've also recorded some of our work onto our iPads using an app called StoryKit.  Below you'll find links to view Keegan's book and Sarah's book.  On the iPads these look like books.  Online you'll see all the pages at once.  You can click on the speaker icon to hear a sound recording. 
     Sarah's Book
     Keagan's Book

Please note that using this app was a learning experience.  Some pages might be incomplete.

Dictionary App

We've been working on paragraph writing for a few weeks now.  Students must write paragraphs throughout the week during book groups, writing time, and unit work.  Our newest iPad app is a dictionary.  Here's Jonah and Zoe editing their work and checking the spelling of a few words with this awesome resource.

Cooking Sobaheg and Comparing Pilgrims on the Wampanoags

We are deep in our study of the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims.  Last week we cut up squash from our school garden and cooked it into a stew with cornmeal called sobaheg.  This is a traditional Wampanoag stew made from wild game and cornmeal.  We left the meat out to satisfy the vegetarians in the class.

We also made cornmeal with blueberries.  Several students said we should tell the kitchen to cook this food for school lunch!

We watched a movie and read information from the Plimoth Plantation website to gather information on the lifestyle of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags back in 1621.  Then we took those notes and used them to write a paragraph comparing and contrasting the two groups.

Place Value

Why is place value so important in math?  How does it help us to understand quantities?  How can we use our understanding of place value to add or subtract accurately?

Students record their understanding of place value onto their ipads.

David creates a sound recording which describes what happens to a number when the digits are rearranged.

In this math unit, we are working on identifying the digits in a number, rounding off numbers to the nearest hundreds or tens place, adding three-digit numbers, and finding the difference between two numbers.

Use your understanding of place value to solve these problems:

254 + 329 = n                 78 + x = 143                   522 - 218 = a

Sharing their page about place value.

What We Are Reading

All the students in the class are part of a book group led by an adult.  Here's what each group is doing:

Orly's Group: We read a Comanche legend and wrote a paragraph about the main character.  We then recorded this paragraph, paying attention to our phrasing as we read, on our ipads.  We didn't learn very much about the Comanche from this book, so now we are researching the Comanche to find out more about their lifestyle.  We are doing Google searches on our ipads to find out about their homes, their food, their clothing, and the resources they had available.

Mrs. Greenblott's Group:  We are reading a book about Mesa Verde.  We've learned lots of things but also have many questions.  For example, how cold was it in winter?  Was it enough to cover the windows with stone slabs to keep warm?  It's really cool to look at pictures of homes built into caves along cliff walls.  We are taking notes on stickies, discussing what we write, and then recording what we've learned, what we wonder about, and what we think on our ipads.

Laurie's Group:  We are studying the Havasupai tribe.  These Native Americans are from a canyon in Arizona.  In reading a book about the tribe, we noticed that the people lived in a very dry place in the country but that they grew food in gardens.  We wondered, where were these gardens?  We used Google Earth to discover that the gardens would have been located along the lush floors of the canyon while the tops of the plateaus are too dry for farmland.  We are also creating a book on our ipads to share what we have learned.

Deb's Group:  We are reading a legend from Native Americans on the Plains.  We are also researching what life was like for those Native Americans.