Students have been learning to make inferences using text and picture clues. Today I showed them the book Yo! Yes! by Chris Raschka and students made inferences based mostly on the illustrations. Afterwards we created a cartoon from the book and included some of our inferences as thought bubbles.

As part of art, we have been explore optical illusions. Check out this terrifc website demonstrating a variety of optical illusions.

Great media smart site that students have been using as part of our media unit we have been doing in the library.

Jacob and Callum made this short stop motion video in their working with words literacy workstation.

Today we started our reading unit: The Power to Infer. I introduced the word "infer" and explained that it is something good readers do to try and figure out what the author is saying, even though the author may not have actually written it down. Good readers are able to infer because they look for clues in the pictures as well as the words to help them figure out what the book is about.
(Source: Reading Power by Adrienne Gear)

Today we practiced inferring by trying to guess what the person was feeling in the following pictures (the feeling words were covered at the time).

I added a bunch of probability games to the math section on the side bar.
P. Johnson

Students worked in pairs to solve the following problem. Afterwards they presented their solution using our webcam and stop animation software Frames4.

On Friday we had the pleasure of video conferencing with author and book reviewer Claire Cameron. Mrs. Cameron told students about her writing and how she used her writer's notebook to capture her thoughts, feelings and ideas. Students then asked her questions to learn more about Mrs. Cameron and how she became a writer. Mrs. Cameron provided thoughtful engaging answers that gave insight to her life as a writer. I think students also realized that they are all writers to! After the video conference students used jot notes to paraphrase what they learned from interviewing Mrs. Cameron. Below is the podcast they created!