Wordle for Character Descriptions

Put it into a Cloud

The Marty McGuire Think Tank Group

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!

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!

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!

Global Read Aloud 2013

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.