Five for Friday - More Biography Work

Happy Friday!  It's time for the popular Five For Friday linky brought to you by Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching.

1. We started the week with another SNOWSTORM!  Enough already!  That groundhog is not to be trusted! It will take until June for all of this to melt.  Ugh...

2. We continued our study of biographies, and one of the mentor texts I used was about Matthew Henson.  He was an African American explorer who was one of the first to reach the North Pole.  His story is quite exciting, and I chose to share it with my students when my principal came in to do a formal observation this week.  Afterwards, we discussed cause and effect, and my third graders came up with the idea that Matthew failed many times but kept trying.  And the effect of his effort was that he was finally able to make it to the North Pole. It all went like clockwork.  Yay!

3. Today we talked about the life lessons that we have learned through the amazing people we have read about.  The students came up with great ideas, like Helen Keller taught us that you can do anything if you put your mind to it, and Rosa Parks taught us to stand up for yourself.  We plan to make posters of these life lessons and hang them around the school, giving credit to the people that have inspired us through their biographies.

4. We still have 3 and half days of school before we begin Spring Break.  I am going to Florida with a friend and we got tickets to see Jerry Seinfeld in Tampa.  We got the tickets on StubHub and lucked out on a great deal on some Orchestra Level seats - right in the center.  Can't wait!

5. We finished a persuasive writing project.  The students did a nice job - especially on their closing statements.  I used this funny commercial as an intro to the writing project. 

(Click on the link to view the commercial on YouTube.)