The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle

Last week we began reading The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle as a whole class. We have been having a lot of fun using this text to develop our 6th grade literacy skills.

Before we began reading we practiced our skimming and prediction skills with the Ultimate Skimming Challenge! Each crew (our ships are The Neverland, The Durmstrang, The Jolly Roger, The Dawn Treader and The Seahawk) had a few minutes to skim the text and look at the information on the covers. Then, they had 10 minutes to work as a team to develop a skit where they acted out their predictions and expectations for the text for the class. It was great to see them developing their collaboration and communication skills.

These skits were HILARIOUS... we have quite a few exceptional actors and actresses in the 6th grade! Some of the props and costumes that were created for these skits from trash materials created quite a spectacle! They did some great thinking about their predictions for this book and there seems to be a general consensus that there will be a murder involved... spooky!

This week we began to dive into the text and have been analyzing it through the scope of tone and word choice. The 6th graders have analyzed portions of the text and "re-mixed" them by changing out words to create an entirely different tone. They have also created their own "adventure journals" where they will be applying their learning about word choice and tone to create tone in their own story.

We had a great week and I am so enjoying getting to know our 6th graders even better!