Wow! What an interesting ELA class we had! Today we talked about what it means to infer information. Inferring, inferencing, or making an inference, whichever phrasing you use, means that you take information that is given to you, combine it with your background knowledge to make a connection to come up with a conclusion of some sort. We infer when we read and in our every day lives.
To introduce inferring, we played a game of Charades. The students were given words that described a feeling, they needed to act out with a partner and the rest of the students needed to guess. We went through almost the whole class without 1 person being able to guess! We had a discussion - was this because our inferencing skills are still being developed or being our acting skills aren't quite "Hollywood" material? We decided that it was probably a little bit of both.
When partners were acting out a certain emotion, we realized that sometimes the audience was guessing based on the actions of the "wrong" partner. For example, one student had her head in her hand, while her partner appeared to be scolding her. Who are we supposed to be focusing on? We had to stop and think - what do we need to do in order to get our message across, without words, clearer? How can we make sure that the emotion we are trying to show, is the most prevalent in our charade? So we revised. Even Plan B, or our revised actions didn't always work. Why not? Students regrouped and planned out their charades once more. Some students decided they needed an extra person to show their emotion, some students decided to change their skit altogether, and some students decided to change an invisible prop (it's much easier for an audience to see an invisible ice cream cone falling to the floor, than it is to see an invisible bunch of balloons floating in the air).
By the end of class, more than half of the students still were not able to successfully get the audience to guess their word. Tonight, students are going home to think about what they can do to better get their message across. What started out to be a lesson on inferencing and more about the audience, turned into a lesson that perfectly mirrors the writing process! I just love when lessons can be meant for one reason but turn into a multi-purposeful experience!
In other news, our Scholastic Book Orders came in! With this set of orders, we earned 10 free books, a set of Diary of a Wimpy Kid bookmarks, and 5,000 points to be used towards classroom books! I am truly amazed at the remarkable readers we have in this class! Keep up the good work kiddos!
We have also been busy preparing for the math test coming up. Yesterday, we had a full hour of math workshop! Take a look at the pictures below to see what we have been up to.
To introduce inferring, we played a game of Charades. The students were given words that described a feeling, they needed to act out with a partner and the rest of the students needed to guess. We went through almost the whole class without 1 person being able to guess! We had a discussion - was this because our inferencing skills are still being developed or being our acting skills aren't quite "Hollywood" material? We decided that it was probably a little bit of both.
When partners were acting out a certain emotion, we realized that sometimes the audience was guessing based on the actions of the "wrong" partner. For example, one student had her head in her hand, while her partner appeared to be scolding her. Who are we supposed to be focusing on? We had to stop and think - what do we need to do in order to get our message across, without words, clearer? How can we make sure that the emotion we are trying to show, is the most prevalent in our charade? So we revised. Even Plan B, or our revised actions didn't always work. Why not? Students regrouped and planned out their charades once more. Some students decided they needed an extra person to show their emotion, some students decided to change their skit altogether, and some students decided to change an invisible prop (it's much easier for an audience to see an invisible ice cream cone falling to the floor, than it is to see an invisible bunch of balloons floating in the air).
By the end of class, more than half of the students still were not able to successfully get the audience to guess their word. Tonight, students are going home to think about what they can do to better get their message across. What started out to be a lesson on inferencing and more about the audience, turned into a lesson that perfectly mirrors the writing process! I just love when lessons can be meant for one reason but turn into a multi-purposeful experience!
In other news, our Scholastic Book Orders came in! With this set of orders, we earned 10 free books, a set of Diary of a Wimpy Kid bookmarks, and 5,000 points to be used towards classroom books! I am truly amazed at the remarkable readers we have in this class! Keep up the good work kiddos!
We have also been busy preparing for the math test coming up. Yesterday, we had a full hour of math workshop! Take a look at the pictures below to see what we have been up to.
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