Frindle Storyboard

Sorry for my absence all last week. After a crazy few weeks filled with report cards, parent-teacher interviews, a workshop I led for parents AND a bathroom renovation here at home I just needed some time off!

My grade 4 class and I are reading Frindle by Andrew Clements together as a read aloud. I have planned this primarily as an oral communication project. In the Ontario Language Arts Curriculum students are expected to listen to oral texts and analyze them just as they do when reading.

Expectations
- demonstrate an understanding of the information and ideas in a variety of oral texts by summarizing important ideas and citing important details (e.g., present an oral report to the class after listening to a guest speaker; use a graphic organizer to map the important ideas in a text; represent the important ideas of an oral text through visual art, music, or drama)
- make inferences using stated and implied ideas in oral texts (e.g., listen “between the lines”to detect bias in an oral text)
- extend understanding of oral texts by connecting the ideas in them to their own knowledge, experience, and insights; to other texts, including print and visual texts; and to the world around them

This is the assignment handout and rubric that I have given to my class. The rubric is based on on the Grade 4 Ontario curriculum so it will need to be adapted for your use unless you also teach Grade 4 in Ontario!! (All clipart is from Scrappin Doodles.) 


We have started off very slow with this assignment. We wrote the retell for Chapter 1 together and created a checklist of what makes a good retell. 

As a class we then brainstormed the important ideas from Chapter 2 on the board before they started writing their retell independently. For the third chapter, the students brainstormed the important details in groups and then did a gallery walk to gather any missing ideas from the other groups. Finally, for Chapter 4 they were on their own!!

I just read through the storyboards tonight and I am very proud of my students are doing on this assignment. Chapter 5 is quite long so instead of doing a retell the students will just be drawing a picture of their favourite part of the chapter. 

Here are some pictures of the kid's assignments so far...just Chapters 1- 4. 

I am excited to keep going with this project. Along with more retells we are going to be making connections, inferring and so much more!!