Students in the Write

Featured Town: Bearmont

Class Congresswoman, Claire, says, “Come to Bearmont, Your children will be amazed with all of the kinds of bears in the zoos and in the wild. (P.S. no bear attacks, good bears only)” Are you interested? Click here for information.

This project integrates social studies, reading, writing, listening, speaking, art, and technology. After studying our own community and reading about others, students began creating their own towns. They included community helpers that are important to make a community thrive: police officers, firefighters, stores, homes, and transportation to name a few. We created town maps using a program called Neighborhood Map Machine in the computer lab.

In our writing piece used for the pod casts, students honed their skills in paragraph writing. Students have been studying main idea and supporting details. Using graphic organizers, we examined our words choice so as to persuade someone to move to our town. We also included a closing sentence to sum up our thoughts. Some of our advanced writers used graphic organizers to learn when to break for a new paragraph and use transitional words and phrases to help their writing flow.

The children were very creative and had a great deal of fun while working. We hope you enjoy listening to our writing. Maybe you will find a town that is just right for you!

Click here to see and hear about our towns.

Our intrepid travel reporter, Nicole, from Mrs. Calvert’s second grade class, has the scoop on New York City. If you want to have a good time in the city, let Nicole’s expert itinerary give you ideas! Click here to listen.

“My Trip to New York City” as read by Nicole

In our first published piece, students created a picture book describing a memory special to them. The class studied the author Cynthia Rylant to discover where writers get their ideas. Using our mentor author, we studied When the Relatives Came, Dog Heaven, Night in the Country, and Henry and Mudge. Once students completed their draft, students edited their pieces with guest parent editors. Finally, they visited the computer lab to publish their books using the program Storybook Weaver. Adding the oral storytelling using the ipods helped our class not only meet the New York State Standard for using language for literary response and expression in writing but for reading and speaking as well.

Click here to go to Ms. McCabe’s Class Stories

In anticipation of the new season, our class wrote winter poems. Along with Mrs. Etman our ESL teacher, our class brainstormed a list of winter words prior to writing. This mind map served as a source for inspiration and as a reference for spelling. Students edited with teachers. Afterwards, they published their poems onto winter stationary. These are currently on display in the hallway!

Everyone at Morse was very excited about our new Pod Casting website, especially the students! However, before we could introduce the website to the World Wide Web, we needed to give it a name and a tag line. Our students were asked to brainstorm titles and they didn’t let us down! When the contest was over we had eighteen entries, each of them were fantastic. The winning entry would become the Blag name and the runner up would become the tag line. Our panel of teachers had the difficult job of narrowing the list down to our five finalists and they were:

• Ms. McCabe’s Super Smart Class
• Students in the Write
• Ms. McCabe’s Sweet Angles
• Ms. McCabe’s Class Website
• Ms. McCabe’s Magical Menagerie on Magical Mountain

The students voted, and the winner was “Students in the Write” by Clair. The runner up was “Ms. McCabe’s Magical Menagerie on Magical Mountain” by Jack. The teachers at Morse school wanted to thank all of our students who participated in the contest!

A masthead is the section of a newspaper that tells the date, issue, and name of the publication. We are lucky because Ms. McCabe’s class is full of artists. They helped our Pod Casting site by creating individual mastheads. Each time you come to the site, a different masthead will appear! If you want to go through the different looks, just click on the masthead, this will refresh the page. Thank you Ms. McCabe’s class!