Our research project has begun!
This week and the beginning of next week, we have two projects we will be focused on.
In science we are creating a biome brochure. Our purpose with this brochure is to PERSUADE and INFORM our reader. We should be persuading our reader to visit our biome, and also informing them about our chosen biome. In order to do this we will start by researching our biome.
We had a long talk today about good research. Research has changed quite a bit from when we would spend long weekends in the library looking through card catalogs, encyclopedias, and ancient texts. While it is wonderful how easily we can access information these days, it also means we must be discerning when picking websites to use when researching.
We talked about how anyone and everyone can put whatever they like on the internet. In order to illustrate this I started writing random things on the website. Feel free to click on the blah blah link on the left for a random assortment of things students yelled at me today!
During the next two days we will be doing quite a bit of research. This research will be done at school. I always give students a good amount of time to work on projects at school. We don’t all have the same resources available to us, and it’s not quite fair to all if I expect projects to be done at home. As such there is no science homework tonight, but if some students would like to continue researching at home they may. I would ask that for now students stick to these two websites:
Wise Owl
KDE
In Writing we will be creating our own version of A Bad Road for Cats. We’ve talked about this story a good deal in class, and about the character of Magda and how she seems to have changed throughout the story. Students will now write their OWN version of the story, and instead of Magda will substitute the character that they created and have been writing about.
We first took some notes in our writing journal making sure we had a good story map of the original story. We came up with this together:
badroadforcatsstorymap
Tonight students should at minimum create their own story map of their Bad Road For Cats Version 2. They will replace Magda with their own character. The general outline should remain the same, but they may change a decent amount. What is important is that their character shouldn’t react the same way that Magda does. They should react the way their character would react. Get into your character’s shoes and think about how they would really react to these situations. What would they do? What would they say? How would they feel? Write with these in mind.
Here is what we started on (and what their own story map should kinda look like):
badroadforcatsversion2
Students should also do their next 4 vocab squares in their vocabulary journal.
wordlistject
In math we played a fun game called banker and boss. Essentially one person is the banker and the other person is (surprise!) the boss. The banker gives the boss some money, and the boss needs to pay his/her employees. They need to divide their money evenly among their employees and figure out how much each would be paid. This helps us to understand division, and also eventually to understand how the standard algorithm for long division works.
Tonight students have 3 of these banker/boss problems to do. If possible, I would LOVE for them to do then with a parent or guardian. If that’s not possible I understand, but it should be 10-15 mins out of your day tops. Please give it a try if you can.
bankerbosssep20
so, tl;dr
Make sure you have at MINIMUM a story map of your Bad Road for Cats version 2.
badroadforcatsversion2
next 4 words off vocab list in vocab notebook
wordlistject
Biome research if you would like but not required
Some banker/boss problems with a parent guardian if possible
bankerbosssep20
and read!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter