Our New Novel
Henry Huggins, the classic by Beverly Cleary, is the new novel the class has begun in reading class. We do some whole group reading and discussion, then move on to some creative written assignments called Reader’s Workshop. These assignments are designed to encourage children to think more deeply about the novel as well as to help them work on skills needed to mature as independent readers. Students get to choose which assignments to work on.
Reader’s Workshop assignments this week include predicting, retelling and expressing an opinion of the story. Others include working with cause and effect, characters, and climax and resolution.
Weird Word Cubes is everyone’s favorite assignment. This is a game I made up in which the player gets a set of nine cubes with a specific part of speech written on each side of each cube. They roll and the cubes, then arrange them into a sentence that makes sense, but is often on the goofy side. Then they illustrate the sentence and identify one or two of the parts of speech. The idea is to provide practice with parts of speech, but more importantly, to help students broaden their use of descriptive words in their own writing.
