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Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Writing Celebration

 Fourth grade authors published their first informational writing pieces of the year today!  These nonfiction books are on display in our classroom now.  To help celebrate all of our hard work, we invited the students from Mrs. LeFrancois' class to come read our books and share their own nonfiction writing.  Students filled out compliment sheets for one another, highlighting wonderful aspects of each other's writing.

It was wonderful to see the pride students took in sharing their work, as well as the respect they had for all of the other authors in the room!  Soon we will celebrate with a special authors' luncheon in our classroom.








Monday, January 16, 2017

App Smashing, Media Literacy, and Book Trailers in Fourth Grade Enrichment Library Classes #vted #vsla

This is a guest post from our enrichment teacher, Darcie Rankin and our library media specialist, Beth Redford.

Fourth graders at RES are continuing to wrap up a unit on media literacy. They learned about several strategies that advertisers use to get people's attention and convince them to buy products. Then they practiced finding those strategies in different kinds of advertisements. Finally, the scholars created video advertisements for books, also known as book trailers, to try to convince other scholars to read their favorite stories. Here are two more great examples, from a fourth graders who used the advertising strategies of Intensity, Plain Folks, Fear (to get the viewer's attention), and Repetition in their book trailers for Smile by Raina Telgemeier and The Time of the Fireflies by Kimberley Griffiths Little.

And a behind the scenes note: these scholars used the "app smashing" technique of using more than one application on a digital device to create a single final product. The fourth graders used the iMovie, Green Screen, Camera, and Notes apps together make these amazing videos!