Spaghetti Trees? On April Fools Day?

Students adding a carefully researched fertilizer containing 1 part olive oil and 3 parts basil flakes.

 

 

That's right. Today in class we learned about spaghetti trees as we practiced two strategies to help us better understand and retain informational text. The first strategy was to preview questions before accessing the information. In this case, we previewed five comprehension questions related to a documentary about  the Swiss spaghetti crop of 1957. Then we watched this three minute BBC documentary. We  began our written responses to the comprehension questions using key words and phrases in the questions themselves. The second strategy was summarizing. We used the answers to our comprehension questions to help us write a five sentence paragraph summarizing the information in the documentary. To wrap up the lesson, we assembled our own spaghetti plants to take home. With lots of love and care, these plants should grow providing you and yours with your own homegrown spaghetti. Enjoy. Oh, and kids, happy April Fools Day :-)