The book that we wrote the timeline from was "A River Ran Wild" by Lynne Cherry. The children are working on the skill of summarizing, and were able to break down the events in the story of the life of the Nashua River into what we called the "most important events" with some support from Marie and myself. With scaffolding, they broke the story into its' four main parts; Native American times, Settler times, Industrial times, and Modern times. We worked on the summary during the reading block, and the kids did a great job. They are getting much better at discerning details from main events; which is an offshoot of Main Idea/Detail.

The books are incredibly beautiful, and the integration of literacy and art is at its best in this one piece! It's one of my favorites of all the activities we've done. I am learning so many new ways to use art to engage the kids as we integrate it into literacy.

The latest project we are working on is the building of cities and towns through fabric and applique, which Marie has done a wonderful job of describing. We've done a lot of cooperative learning with pre-designated groups, but for this I wanted to try a random selection of groups. I chose this purposefully so that the kids could understand/experience different groupings and the fact that societal interactions are often random experiences. They did very well with this grouping and were excited to find out who was in their group as they each picked a "secret" fabric from the bag!