Mrs. Cooper's Bio

This is my 18th year of teaching in the Chicago Public Schools and my 14th year at Decatur. In my 18 years of teaching, I have taught everything from 1st grade to 8th grade! Literacy & Social Studies are passions of mine and I am very excited to be teaching 5th grade English Literacy and Social Studies this year.

I received my undergraduate degree from DePauw University in elementary education and history. Later I attended DePaul University and received my master’s degree as a reading specialist with a focus on learning disabilities. I'm excited to be utilizing my background in history & literacy in my classroom on a daily basis. I'm lucky to be able to teach two of my favorite subjects this year!

When I'm not teaching, I enjoy spending time with my family, traveling, figure skating, and doing needlepoint. I also am very excited to be having my first child this fall!

Posts

6th graders work together during our Wednesday Colloquium period to create secret messages. Can you guess this secret message?

A 6th grader shows her understanding and analysis of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas through sketchnotes!

Refugee Character Poems

7th graders wrote free verse poems to represent one of the main characters from our novel Refugee.

Check out one of our 5th grader's response to literature essay about our novel, Freak the Mighty!

6th Grade Winter Imagery

6th graders chose a winter picture and used imagery and figurative language to write a caption.

5th graders shower their thinking while reading our novel, Freak the Mighty.

Students showed their prior knowledge on this week's focus skill, conflict.

7th Graders participated in a virtual Think-Pair-Share about their novel Refugee.

7th graders read a reverse poem about refugees. During the 1st read, students listened to the poem read from top to bottom (sketch-notes on the left). During the 2nd read, students listened to the poem read from bottom to top (sketch-notes on the right). Students discussed how the same poem read in a different order could evoke completely different feelings!

Justification Anchor Charts

This week we focused on writing our justifications for our body paragarphs of our essays. Students in grades 5th-7th made their own anchor charts to help remember the important elements of their justifications.

TAG & Summary Practice

This week students began working on their introductory paragraph of their short story essays. We focused on writing and combining TAGs (title/author/genre) and summaries. Students were asked to share on Padlet with their classmates a TAG + Summary of a book that they've read recently.

This week in ELA, we read Roanoke The Lost Colony: An Unsolved Mystery in History and, students formed their own theories as to what happened to the lost colony. We then participated in our first-ever virtual gallery walk where students were able to comment on their classmates' theories.

Food Truck "Tweets"

Food Trucks...YUMMM! JMS Integrated Unit

JMS Advertisement Project

Name: Katherine Cooper
Position: 4th-5th | ELA
Email: kgcooper@cps.edu

Katherine Cooper

5th Grade Literacy & Social Studies Teacher