Week 4 Fifth Grade

News Flash (Non-fiction, Level 15, Stage 3) by Sharon Hill

We carried on this week with the news/media theme by using News Flash, a book written to help kids learn about the process of news becoming The News and the different media outlets that carry it, such as radio, print and television. We tend to watch the news several times a week, so I wasn’t surprised that Elijah was very interested in this book, as he was in last week’s book Knightly News, but I was surprised that he wanted to take it a bit further by writing a comic strip about a news casting superhero outside of his regular school time! Of course, I obliged his desire and told him how proud I was of it when he was finished and how impressed I was at his initiative. I love seeing the desire to learn and create grow in my children, and I’m thankful to have AlphaSkills to foster that.

The activity I want to highlight this week is the Survey Chart. For this activity students are asked to complete a few questions each day in survey format in order to bring deeper understanding of the book’s concept. This week the following items were provided on the survey for Elijah to complete: Title of the book/chapter; My prediction from title about what this book/chapter will be about; Look carefully at all the visuals (pictures, maps, graphs, etc. and their captions) in this book/chapter and describe how two of them give important information about a book/chapter with this title; Restate three of the subtitles or headings in question form (select from the beginning, middle and end of the book/chapter); Read the first paragraph, last paragraph and any review or end-of-chapter questions for this book/chapter and list one thing that you believe the author feels is important about this content that you already knew and one that is new information for you; Reread the first question you wrote in Part II and read in the book/chapter until you find the answer to that question, put the answer in your own words, and be ready to recite this answer to the teacher or a buddy when assigned to do so; Use this form and class discussions to help review the content read and write what you believe is the main idea of this book/chapter. As you can see, this is a format we can use with multiple books in various content areas throughout the school year, and it really worked well to help Elijah dig out all of the information in this book.

For more information about the AlphaSkills Read with Sarah curriculum and our family, see the AlphaSkills Blog Introduction.