WONDERful Word Wednesday: Check out Wonderopolis

As a class we focused on Wonder  #407 What Does it Mean To Be a Native American?  I posed this question to the class prior to showing them the WONDER on the smart board.  It was interesting to me because the students really struggled with this question.  I only had one hand raised and his response was that Native Americans speak a different language. This connected with last week's Scholastic News article "Why Are These Kids so Excited?" After a little prompting, our list grew in this order.

#1 homes are different based on climate and location, location location
#2  grow their own food (realized that NA don't just hunt)
#3  cultural differences
#4 different tribes-celebrate different events, religions, ceremonies
#5 clothing is different-deerskin-use animals (natural resources)

I believe this conversation hit every 5th grade state indicator from one WONDER question, but we kept on learning.  Next we watched the video which is amazing because the video totally broke the stereotype of my class when the caption stated:  2011 World Champion Hoop Dancer.  What an amazing way to discuss how we need to celebrate our cultural differences especially in today's world.

Finally, if anyone reads my blog regularly you know I LOVE words so we looked at the vocabulary words.  This activity also caught me off guard I asked the class to highlight the words they were not familiar with or better yet would not want to take on a test?  Here is our class results. The numbers represent the number of students who did not know that the word meant........wow!!

So next the students went off with their paper copy of the wonder and located the words that they did not know in the article-highlighted them and used context clues to figure out the meaning.  They listed the new words in their social studies spiral with their best definition from using context.  Finally for homework, they left a SUPER comment to share with the world about their learning.  It was a WONDERFUL Wednesday.