Welcome back!
We had a very productive first day back. Almost everyone remembered how to do decimal multiplication using an area model (whew!), and we spent our morning reviewing our Case 21 math assessment. Overall, the students did very well on this, and I was happy with their work. We did however run into the problem of silly mistakes because we didn’t check our work, or answer what the question was asking. We will continue to work on these skills until the end of the school year I am sure.
We then spent just one final half hour in the computer lab, and I gave students an opportunity to make final improvements to their biome research brochures. On the whole, the class average on these was quite low. We had talked at length about how our purpose was to inform and persuade, but many students had trouble actually informing the reader in their brochures. I am hopeful that they made some improvements.
In the afternoon, we did a brief introduction to cells. We talked about how they are the building blocks of all living things, and some of the basic differences between animal and plant cells. Tonight students have a short reading comprehension selection to read on cells, with questions to answer. As always their answer should contain reasoning!
After this we did some rotations where students spoke with me about their report cards (they went home today by the way!), worked on a word ladder, and took an assessment on Lexia. Lexia is a new program that we will be using for language arts differentiation. It offers targeted instruction for each student at their level, and I’m hoping they will enjoy it. The link can be found in the language arts links above, and their username and password are their lunch numbers. They are more than welcome to use the program at home, and we will be using it during rotations in the classroom.
Finally, we only had about 2 minutes to go outside and take a quick look at our plants, but they have gotten HUGE! And we have cucumbers growing! Maybe we’ll get to make some pickles 🙂
so, tldr;
One cell worksheet
One word ladder
And read for 35 minutes!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter