Building Bridges

For our last English Langauge Arts unit our theme was "Building bridges between unlikely friendships".  We read many books about unlikely friendships including Owen and Mzee, Henry and Mudge, and Charlotte's Web.  We discussed the plot of these stories as well as really looking at character traits of each person in the book.  As part of this unit we discussed figurative langauge like idioms and synonyms for adjectives and verbs.  We also discussed how building bridges was a metaphor about making friends with people you may not normally be friends with and not putting up walls.  To end our unit, students brought in household items abd we investigated different types of bridges.  They put their engineering skills to the test and worked in groups to build their own bridges.  It was fantastic!