Our Humanities Blog : Today's Humanities Class

Humanities Classby Gian

February 12, 2014
Today, I started off reading the learning target so I could know what we were supposed to be focused on. I also looked at the class's Agenda, so I could know what we were going to do in order.

Je working on the Do Now.

Our class's Learning Targets.

Our class's Agenda.

But as a class, today we started off doing our do now, which had four questions about how to know the character in a book. It was just a reflection, just so we could test ourselves what we know about it before we actually learn about it.

Our Do Now

After that, we shared our answers with our partner. Then we shared our answers as a whole class, and we made a list of how to know your character.

Je & Maya sharing their answers to each other

"Getting to Know Your Character" List.

Ms. Vallillo then introduced what we were going to do in today's class, which is called the purpose, that Ms. Vallillo always writes on the board. Then we read some examples and we needed to figure out how to know the character by making inferences on the story, or maybe just finding a quote the character says in the story.

Our purpose, which helps to guide us.

My table's example.

We discussed, as a class, how to get to know the specific character that a student just read. We came up with lots of items in the list, for example: we could know the character by his/her tone of voice. Then we needed to walk around the class making inferences on the sheet of paper that each table had, by writing in the table with a marker. Each table had a different example. We make an inference of how to know the character by: what they say, what they look like, their thought, their acts, and the acts of others, We then needed to explain why that helps to know the character in the table as well. Then we went walking, with music, which made us very motivated.

Me preparing myself to write an inference!

Look what we ended up with!

A student working on an inference.

Gabe, Anna Clara, and JP reading and making inferences.

After fifteen minutes, we sat down after writing lots of inferences. Then Ms. Vallillo explained on what tables the inferences was good, and what inferences needed more work and explanation on. The students from each table read their short paragraph of the story and we made inferences together as a class. (We didn't wrote them down, it was kind of a reflection on what we have just done.)

Ms. Vallillo explaining what inferences were good together as a class.

We then cleaned our desks and we got our "The City of Ember" book and our Do Now. Ms. Vallillo thought us that there a lot of ways to know your characters, and on the Do Now, we wrote this, while Ms. Vallillo did it in Elmo as a class.

Back page of the Do Now

Each topic, like thoughts, words, actions, looks, and others thinks, have lots of other ways to know the character on that topic. We needed to choose a character on the book and choose quotes from them and insert it in the right topic and explain what it tells about the character. I chose the mayor and went searching for quotes.

André looking for quotes.

Time was then over, and we stopped doing our inferences and finding quotes in the book. Ms. Vallillo then chose some examples and explained about the specific character that the student chose to do. We then made a list of High Quality Inferences, so we can make in mind as we do it reading the City of Ember, like supporting the text, makind an educated guess, and see what is actually important to the story.
We then read our partner's paper, and made comments about if his/her notes were supporting the text, was an educated guess, and is important to the text. I went with Joe. Joe and I switched paper and made comments about each other's notes.