Welcome back! I hope you had a fantastic track out, and got some much needed rest.
Today we eased our way back into a routine, and having to actually do work!
First we talked about syllables, and that they are units of sound usually centered on a vowel. We talked about spot and dot strategies for breaking words into syllables, and that we can also count syllables by paying attention to when our mouth opens to make a vowel sound.
This all led into our discussion of haiku. We’ll be dabbling with some poetry this quarter, and we’re starting with something nice and easy. We came up with a few haiku on our own, and then came up with some ‘riddle’ haiku, and challenged our groupmates to guess the topic of our haiku.
Tonight students should write a simple haiku about something they did on their break. It should be riddle-like, and we’ll be guessing at each other’s haiku tomorrow.
Here’s some info that we went over about Haiku:
Here’s mine about my break:
splish, splash, petting, yay!
Mira screams and laughs loudly
We go there in May
We then went over our new vocabulary list. Tonight students should make 5 sentences, using each of the first five words.
We then spent a good amount of time looking at our science Case 21s, and finding where we made our mistakes. Our performance was not stellar on these, but there were a few questions that I felt were really ‘gotcha!’ type questions, and I am never a fan of those.
Finally to end our day we took a trip to the computer lab, where students took a Star Test. I had an idea I wanted to try out, and I was fairly successful. The Star Test measures things like vocabulary and grammar skills, and basically whether you have been reading or not. I had each student take the test, and then I guessed at how many books they had read over track out. For the most part I was right on the money, guessing TWENTY ONE out of TWENTY SEVEN students correctly. I literally simply looked at their score, and if they didn’t move since track out, or went down, I guessed zero books, and more often than not, I was correct.
It is so extremely important that students keep reading. There’s only so much we can do with 5 instructional hours of school each day. Reading each day for 30 minutes to an hour is an absolutely gigantic addition to that time. Please make sure students are reading at home. It is the most beneficial thing you can do for their education.
so, tl;dr
write a simple haiku riddle about something you did over track out
write a sentence using each of the first 5 words on our vocab list this week.
read for 35 minutes!!!
Have a good one,
-Mr. Potter
PS: I hate the program that we use to make report cards, and it was down for most of the day. As such I could not print out report cards. They will be going home tomorrow! My apologies.