Good news! Your Canadian Heroes Website has gotten a ton of views. Let’s check who’s in the lead.

Then we’re starting a new unit on technology and the future. Think about this statement:

The world will be a better place in the future because of technology.  

Imagine a line in your head with Strongly Agree at one end and Strongly Disagree at the other. Where would you place yourself on that line and why?

Then we will look at a couple pages on futuristic technology in your books. Miss Newhall is going to model for you how you can preview a text to make some predictions.

Then you will look at a chart in your book that gives you tips for making inferences and asking questions.

Next you will make a foldable that you can keep to help remind you of reading strategies and writing strategies.

Today we’re going to have some silent reading and then we’ll finish off our websites. Remember, Fun Friday depends on you and whether or not you all get the website done!

https://sites.google.com/site/thegreatestcanadianherosearch/

We’re going to be focusing on making connections as we read this week. So while you do your silent reading, you are going to have three sticky notes to record connections on. This time I will be giving you sentence starters that you can use to help you make connections. You will record the connections you made in a reading log.

Making connections sentence starters:
I already know about…
This reminds me of…
This compares to…
This is different from… because…
This section made me think about…
If I were in this position I would…

Then we will continue to work on our hero websites. I’d like to have these finished this week so that we can start the contest.

We’re going to start off with a word game today. How many words can you create just using the letters in the word:

THUNDERSTORM

Then we will continue to work on our hero website using the netbooks. I’d like the site to be finished by the end of the week. While you are working on the site, I will be conferncing with you about your paragraphs.

We’re starting with a free write today. Let’s see if you can top your previous score!

Then we’re going to do a portfolio conference.

1) Review the qualities of an effective paragraph. We will decide as a class if there’s anything we should add to our anchor chart.

2) Check the paragraphs in your portfolio. You should have three. Identify which paragraph you think is your strongest and which is your weakest. Make sure you have specific reasons to support your answer.

3) Write me a paragraph explaining your strengths and weaknesses in terms of writing a paragraph and make sure you refer to the work in your portfolio. Please be prepared to share this with me in a portfolio conference.

We’ll begin today with a community circle. Since this weekend was Thanksgiving I thought we could each share one thing we’re thankful for.

Then I’d like for us to discuss as a class what kinds of things we could add to our Greatest Canadian Hero website to make it engaging.

We also need to talk about criteria we use to determine whether or not a website is reliable when we’re doing research.

You will have the remainder of the period to do research using either the netbooks or the laptops. If you’ve completed your research, you can begin writing your opinion paragraph for the website.

Today we’re going to be in the library researching heroes for our Greatest Canadian Hero website.

Today we’re beginning a really exciting project to wrap up our hero unit. We are going to be making a website on Canadian heroes and the goal will be for you to convince people that the hero you’ve chosen should be named the Top Canadian Hero.

We’ll start by brainstorming famous Canadians and then we’ll head down to the library.

Go to the following website: http://www.canadians.ca/

Choose a Canadian that you are interested in and decide to what extent the hero you chose meets the criteria we identified for a hero.

Hi everyone, yesterday I was sick and I had you working on reading an article and identifying the main idea and supporting details. It appears that this was a struggle for many of you so we’ll spend some more time on it today.

We’re also going to look at combining sentences to add variety to your paragraphs. Then you will take one of the paragraphs you’ve already written and see if you can change two single sentences into one sentence with a compound subject or a compound predicate.