Building A Fort

Our journey continues as we dig deeper into understanding colonial forts. Together we looked at various primary sources, including maps, archeological dig reports, and journal entries. Our research inspired a lot of questions, which resulted in more research. Exclamations rang through out the room as new discoveries were uncovered and theories were formed. We carefully examined the archeological dig site of Jamestown, and watched a lot of videos of the archeologists examining the buried treasures. As questions arose, someone often had connections from their own independent research into nonfiction texts.













Of course this wealth of knowledge led us to build our own model of a colonial fort. The conversations around the types of buildings, building scale, and fort shape were passionate and required a lot of supporting evidence for their ideas. As various buildings were constructed, kids constantly referred to the construction map and to each other to ensure they were building according to the plan.

Kids even began adding artifact replicas that were found within the fort. So far this has included a pipkin, spears, and brick bakery ovens. We are all excited to see what new direction we will be inspired by once we've finished construction on the fort model.

Uncovering the Past Through Primary Sources

This month we've began the journey to understand the events leading up to the American Revolution. We began by creating a historical timeline and zooming into the 1600's. From there we studied different maps to determine the purpose behind colonization. Our understandings include:

From there, we dug into the original charter written in 1606 by the lawyers in King James' English courts. Not to be deterred by 400 year-old language, we sought out dictionaries, atlases, and magnifying lenses to understand the intent of the original companies. We were surprised by the language we uncovered regarding spreading Christianity to the native people in America. Reading the original document helped us to better understand the perspective and purpose of the original founders of Jamestown.

Our next steps are to study historical maps, archeology dig reports, and journal entries of the different forts that were constructed in America in the 1600's. We of course had to kick off this research by building our own pillow forts!

Telling Our Stories

A large part of the 5th grade experience is learning to tell story. Our favorite ongoing exploration of our stories is creating the compiled visual depiction in our scrapbooks. Each page is kicked off with a parent or family interview, a hunt for the right photos, and some writing. Putting the pages together is a highlight of Fridays.

We are also working to tell our story through writing memoirs. The writing project began by brainstorming all the different types of watermelon topics, to find the seed stories in our lives. After reading and listening to memoirs by Roald Dahl, Jean Craighead George, John Scieszka, and Patricia Polacco, we determined that memoirs often include dialogue, show emotional reactions, and have a lesson. We workshopped our stories by asking our partners to reenact the emotions heard in the writing; by watching the actions closely, we added descriptive language to paint imagery around our emotional experiences.

Using our own novels as mentors, we've collected examples of dialogue, and then looked closely at these models to create our own meaning behind punctuating dialogue.

We are excited to share our memoirs and scrapbooks with a meaningful audience.