Thursday, November 7, 2013

(GRA) Encore Performance Please

Little Bloggers 

We don't want to spoil the end of the book for you, but we did realize that Marty taught us some valuable lessons that we can connect with. In the comments section below we have each posted our own take-aways from the book.

Please read below and share your thoughts or comment back if you had similar thoughts.

(GRA) What Will Happen to the Frog Prince?

Ribbit


Just as the Marty and her classmates are getting ready to put on their big performance, the stuffed frog rips apart. Marty and Rupert come up with a grande plan to bring the big bullfrog from the pond to the play and use him as the frog instead of the stuffed one Mrs. Aolia wanted them to use.

The Cool Cats predicted what would happen during the play when the real bull frog made her appearance on stage. We used Padlet to present our predictions. We would love to here from you about our Padlet Wall.




Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Wordle for Character Descriptions

Put it into a Cloud

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The Marty McGuire Think Tank Group
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The Veronica Grace Think Tank Group
For Chapter 5 and 6 in our Marty McGuire GRA book, we decided to create a Wordle for both Marty and Veronica Grace. We used as many words or phrases that we could think of from the book that described our characters and ordered them by importance. We then placed them in the Wordle creator and let the magic happen. This was a great activity to build our vocabulary and practice our roles and responsibilities in a team. We also thought about the color and font that best represented our characters. Let us know what you think!

MartyMcGuire

Veronica Grace



Friday, October 11, 2013

The Walls are Flat Now

Great Feedback Cool Cats


After sharing our Voice Thread with other teachers from the Global Read Aloud Project we have have received an awesome amount of responses and compliments for our work, including:

  • A class from British Columbia added their thoughts to our VT -- check it out: Marty McGuire VT

  • Teachers added us to their blog assignments or student blogs for others students to comment on like this one: Kidblog from a 3rd grade class

  • Teachers in our own building want to learn more about using VT in the classroom.

Way to go Cool Cats! Your excitement and enthusiasm for our project has been rewarded. We should all be very proud of each other and our team work! I can't wait to see how Marty inspires us to share our learning in the next chapter!

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Marty McGuire Chapter 2 Voice Thread

We completed chapter two in our Marty McGuire book this week. At the end of the chapter, Marty's teacher assigns her a role in the school play that Marty was not anticipating. The book has a few black and white pictures to support the text. This situation had a picture of Marty with an identifiable facial expression, but no words to support how she was feeling or what she was thinking. This was a perfect time for us to practice inferring what our character may have been feeling or thinking based on her expression and what we know about her.

The Cool Cats created their first Voicethread and would like to invite you to share in their learning. Please follow the link, listen in on our responses, and feel free to add your own. We would love to hear what you have to say about Marty!

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Global Read Aloud 2013

martym

How Cool Is This?


The Cool Cats are taking part in our first Global Read Aloud. We are reading the book Marty McGuire by Kate Messner. Please follow along as we blog our learning and share our book study with students in grades 1-3 all over the world. We are using Scholastic's digital book app, Storia to read the book together, but each of our iPads has access to the books as well, so students may reread the chapters we have already read for reflection and team projects. We look forward to hearing from all of the amazing teachers we have connected with through the project.