DOK 3 throughout our ELA class

After reading and rereading what DOK 3 means I feel like I do a pretty good job at using it throughout the week without even thinking about it! Some weeks it will be one activity where we'll spend time answering a question and doing a Socratic seminar, sometimes it's a Mystery Skype where yes there is a right or wrong answer but kids have to figure out, starting from scratch, how to get to it, and finally projects where they are thinking and creating all week!

I do believe it has been a week where logical answers, comparing and investigating were apart of our daily conversations. One of the first things we started working on was opinion writing. We're taking part in a grade level project where kids are writing persuasive essays, we will put one grand essay onto DonorsChoose.org and hopefully be fully funded to decorate the library with magazines for all students to read! Students had to come up with one reason why we need magazines, then we wrote a persuasive paragraph together. Well, actually they wrote it alone and then we combined great sentences together to form a class paragraph. They really had to dig deep to use those good description words and think why people will care about buying little old us magazines!
Next up, they had to come up with their own ideas and complete the paragraph. They had to formulate arguments to give to people as to why they should help us. They had to connect what we have in the library to what we still need in the library and cite reasons why. I was blown away by how quickly kids got to work, they loved the idea of actually being able to put their writing out for the world to see and get something tangible from it!

In reading class we were talking about The Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman. Since it was a logical link from our Civil Rights talk last week it was an easy transition. Scholastic offers a great site that gives questions and interactive maps for the kids to learn more about the Underground Railroad (since we focused primarily on Harriet Tubman and comparing different authors on the same subjects in small groups). Well, a lot of the questions on that assignment were bold and plain as day in the interactive website, kids were just looking for answers. But, many of them they had to draw conclusions based on previous knowledge of the Underground Railroad, the Civil War (which we talked about in November) and our biographies that we had been reading. Some kids found it very difficult because they are so used to the answer just being there, they just have to find it. But they were able to perceive through and figure out the meaning of the question based on what they learned from the articles.

Donors Choose essay

Website students used to find out extra information about The Underground Railroad