Day 2, and the students are doing AMAZING
Seriously, we have had an absolutely fantastic first two days back. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that things never change.
This morning we reviewed our math from the first quarter. We took a good amount of notes on the distributive property of multiplication, and reviewed many of the concepts we talked about the last nine weeks. I was very impressed with how much everyone has retained.
In the afternoon, we went over our Language Arts Case 21. I was very happy with the majority of the students’ work on this. Pretty much everyone had great reasoning for all of their answers right in their books, and was able to discuss it this afternoon. The mistakes we had, many students were able to talk out and explain using their reasoning. I again was impressed.
One of the biggest problems we had as a class was identifying first vs. third person, and the pros and cons of both. Because of this, we then watched these two videos:
The real story of the three little pigs
We talked about how the point of view that these stories are told in can completely change the story itself, and how you feel about the characters. We had talked about this briefly with the Mysterious Benedict Society, and we revisited that conversation as well. What if the book had been told from Reynie’s point of view? Or Mr. B’s? Or Mr. Curtain’s?
Next, we watched this: Goldilocks
Tonight, students are to re-write the story of Goldilocks and the three bears, as if they were Goldilocks themselves. They should have taken their writing journals home, and should write the story from their own perspective up until the point where they go to bed.
Around this time, we had an something unfortunate happen. A second grader trampled and cut in half some of our corn stalks outside. Two of our students were writing near the window, and saw the entire thing occur. I have talked with the second grader’s parents and his teacher, and he will be experiencing some consequences. We also had him come into our room and explain his actions to the class. It was a very unfortunate occurrence, and it is really sad that something our students have worked so hard on for almost three months could be so easily destroyed by someone’s thoughtlessness. One good thing, however, is that much of the corn is still standing, and the other plants were untouched.
After this we went outside and tended to the plants. We were able to right a few of them, and we’ll hope for the best with the others.
Finally, we talked some more about cells. We looked at some visual examples to give students a size of scale of cells and atoms, and then talked about cells in general, and microscopic organisms. I managed to gross out the entire class when we started talking about living cultures inside of yogurt, and then I showed them a video of Lactobacillus wiggling around in yogurt under a microscope. The revulsion in the room was palpable. It was great.
Tonight, students should read pages A6 – A13 in their science book (surprise, it’s about cells!) and then answer the five questions on page A13. They better have reasoning!
so, tldr;
I’m goldilocks story – up until you go to bed!
Read A6-A13 and do questions 1-5 on page A13 in science book
Read for 35 minutes!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter