The Best Part of Me!

Since I am still at Starbucks enjoying my warm 'Soy Chai Tea Misto with two honeys and a quarter water' while the snow outside continues to melt slowly, I decided to update my blog again with another post about something I did a few weeks ago in my language arts classes...
 

The book The Best Part of Me by Wendy Ewald is an awesome book for reminding our students that 'We are all unique and special'.Thank you to my mom for giving me this idea...

I read this book to my students after discussing the Grimm Fairy Tale 'Rapunzel' the previous day. The reason I read this story was because I think it is very important to expose students to classic literature and Rapunzel was the perfect story for this. Rapunzel's best part of her was obviously her hair and with the movie 'Tangled' that just came out in theatres, we were able to compare and contrast the two stories with our handy dandy double bubble map. This was also the first time many of my students had even heard of the 'Grimms'. The loved it when I told them that these fairy tales were very 'grim' indeed. 4th graders, you've gotta love them... :-) 

I also did a lexicon on the word 'anatomy'. A lexicon is when you take apart the word by 'stepping the syllables', looking it up in the dictionary, using it in a sentence, etc. One of these days I will do a post on lexicons. ANYWAYS, we talked about the word anatomy and read the fairy tale 'Rapunzel' before read The Best Part of Me.

This book is amazing because Wendy Ewald (who is a famous photographer) took pictures of what students thought were their best features. Then the students in this book wrote poems about their favorite features and explained why this was the most 'unique and special' part of them. We actually did the same. We took pictures of our favorite features, wrote rough drafts and final copies of our poems, and posted them for the school to see what makes us who we are. My 42 4th graders loved this activity! They thought it was so great to celebrate our differences. We also focused specifically on our descriptive language and vivid verbs. The final results were super cute and I hope you enjoy them as much as we did.... my favorite was the belly button one...

Well, until next time. Peace. Love. Teaching.