Fun Run in just 2 days!
If you haven’t yet, please go to www.funrun.com and register. We have our actual Fun Run on Thursday!
This morning we spent a good amount of time on our writing and doing individual writing conferences. A good friend of mine, Ms. Hertling, came in to help us. Ms. Hertling is an accomplished teacher, who has taught around the globe. She spent the bulk of her time teaching English at the high school level. She has agreed in her retirement to come in and help us with a few things this school year. She will be here often on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. She was very happy to read the students’ writing, and had tons of great things to say.
We got about half of our writing conferences done, and we’ll try to get the rest done tomorrow and Thursday.
We also talked about writing summaries and finding the main idea of a text. We are often asking “who did what?” “When?” “where?” and “why?” in order to figure out the main idea or to summarize a text.
To practice thinking about these things, students tonight have a short article to read and summarize. There are also some questions that go with the article. They should answer these with reasoning, explaining their answers.
Device May Help Blind People See Passage
We then talked again about finding information in texts. We looked at our biome paper from yesterday and discussed what kind of keywords we looked at in order to find specific information in the index/glossary of our science textbooks. The students did a pretty good job with this, and I was happy with their ability to pick out keywords from questions. These are very important skills to have as they do research and are responsible for finding specific information on their own.
Tonight students should finish the back of the sheet. They should include page numbers where they found the information for each question.
We then again talked briefly about our area models and multiplying multi digit numbers by breaking them down into smaller parts. Tonight students have four problems to do in this manner. Again, please refrain from talking with students about the standard algorithm for multiplying multi-digit numbers. We are not interested in that at this point. We are interested in getting students familiar with how multiplication is distributed across addition, and understanding how we break difficult problems down into small ones. The standard algorithm will come later, and it will make much more sense because of the work we have already done.
Finally we spent some time in the computer lab working on our biome brochures. We talked about the different things we can do in word with text boxes, fonts, and all of the different options word processing software offers. For many students this is overwhelming, but as we do more and more projects on the computers, they will become accustomed to it, and we will have less students erasing all of their work by accident (Which is something that happened today!).
so, tl;dr
Summarize this article, and answer the questions with reasoning:
Device May Help Blind People See Passage
Answer the questions on this sheet using your science textbook, and include the page numbers where you got the information:
Do these problems using area models:
And as always, read!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter
P.S. I have an appointment tomorrow, so I will be absent from school. We will have a substitute, Mrs. Alford. She is a retired teacher from Lockhart (who used to teach 5th grade even). The students are in good hands, and I know I will come back and hear good things from Mrs. Alford.
See you Thursday!