Junior Great Books

This past week, we finished our unit on Friendship in our Imagine It reading series. At the end of each unit, we will take a break from Imagine It, and will do a week-long lesson from Junior Great Books. The purpose in Junior Great Books is to enhance higher order thinking skills in our students. The series is designed to foster discussion between students about the story, and to help them with text dependent writing (a big part of our new Common Core State Standards).

We started our first lesson today. We read the story, "The Banza", and took some time while reading to record questions we had about the story as we read along. The questions the class generated were AMAZING! The story is a Haitian folktale, and we were able to cover some of the more common questions about the story (vocabulary questions, and general questions about the story). The class has some great questions about Haiti, so we took a break to do a little map lesson. We also had a question asking if "banza" was actually a Haitian word, and decided we will do some research on the word to see. Using the context clues in the story, most agreed it probably was a Haitian word, but then we discussed how there are words we use here in America (fiesta for party, for example) that did not originate here. I saw A LOT of deep thinking going on today, and was very impressed!

Please note, there are still spelling words this week, and we will take a spelling test as usual. However, there will be a text dependent writing assignment, versus the traditional  Imagine It assessment you are accustomed to seeing. We will resume Imagine It next week, beginning our unit on Animals and Their Habitats.