Today was another good day of writing.
I was VERY impressed with what I saw today. We only had 4 students come in without their rough drafts. This meant we were able to do a lot of peer editing this morning during writing time. We focused on ensuring we have a solid paper, with a single problem and solution that is resolved inside of five events.
We came up with some reason’s together as a class as to why it is important to have someone else look at our work:
- It makes the writer a better writer by letting them see mistakes
2. It makes the editor a better writer (they get practice finding mistakes and they can get good ideas from the things they read)
3. We are bad at editing our own work (we often see what we wanted to write instead of what we actually wrote. We also know exactly what should happen in our story and sometimes we miss that we didn’t actually tell our reader what happened).
Students did a very good job with this, and pairs had good discussions about what they did and did not understand from each other’s papers.
Tonight students should write a FINAL draft. They should include changes and fixes from their peer edit. We came up with these stipulations for what they are turning in tomorrow:
NO misspellings
NO missed indentions
NO run-on sentences
NO lack of explanations
SKIP LINES
Next we looked at food webs and food chains, and how changes in the environment can affect animal populations. Animal population changes affect OTHER animal populations, and so on and so forth. For instance if we had a food web like this:
If the deer population suddenly died off due to disease, we would expect a drop in the cougar population as they would lose a significant food source. We then might see a rise in rabbits as they lose a number of predators.
Today I took our radish harvest and cooked them in the oven. So far we have eaten raw radish, fried radish, and this was our next thing to try. Unfortunately Mr. Potter may have *slightly* overcooked the radishes. Some students said they were ok, but the massive majority so far have preferred the fried radishes, with some liking the raw radishes the best. I am going to take our next harvest and pickle them over track out. Should be fun!
Next we read a good bit of The Mysterious Benedict Society, and learned of Mr. Curtain’s evil plans!
Finally we looked at equivalent fractions some more. We talked about how there are an infinite number of equivalent fractions for any given fraction. When I am finding an equivalent fraction I am not changing the value of a fraction. I am not adding anything, nor am I taking anything away. I am simply changing the number of pieces that my fraction is cut into. If I take a tray of brownies and cut them into two pieces, I have halves. If I cut each of those in half, I have fourths. I can continue doing this forever theoretically. I have not changed how much I had in the way of brownies, I have simply changed what size pieces they are cut into.
so, tl;dr
Tonight students simply have writing homework again. They should take their peer-edited rough draft, and fix any problems that were found. They should also make sure their paper is divided into paragraphs, with proper indents. I expect these things:
NO misspellings
NO missed indentions
NO run-on sentences
NO lack of explanations
SKIP LINES
and as always, read!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter