Junior Great Books Thursday

This morning in reading we began working with the English folktale Caporushes, which is part of the Junior Great Books program. This program is designed to introduce students to "rich" literature that invites great discussion. Today we read the story and listed questions we were wondering about on chart paper.

While I met with reading groups the students worked on individual reading group assignments. They also chose a new topic to write about and wrote their main idea/topic sentence. After that they sorted past tense and present tense verbs on a worksheet. Finally, they completed any unfinished work and worked on their reading logs.

In math, we split up into small groups to solve a measurement problem that used skills the children had learned but was presented in a new way. This forced the students to work together to decide what the question was asking and what skills they knew that would help them arrive at the solution. After each group shared their results, the groups that made mistakes were given a chance to go back and correct their work. There is a worksheet for homework and we will take our unit assessment on Wednesday of next week.

Following art, lunch and outdoor recess, both Mr. Vogel's and my homeroom had the chance to listen to some "twisted" fairy tales from the book called The Stinky Cheese Man. Then, once Mr. Vogel's class left, my homeroom reviewed the production process for blue jeans from two different factories.

This was a change in our plan due to some last minute scheduling conflicts.

We did have a shortened afternoon reading/writing block where the students continued their independent work from the morning while I met with some reading groups.

Lions: We reviewed their homework from last night which only half of the group did. :-( Then we retold chapter 1. After that we read and discussed chapter 2, out loud. Next the students were expected to reread the chapter and do a 5 finger retell (one finger for each idea they state). The students struggled with this...however, they later redeemed themselves when they stated some wonderful predictions for the rest of the story with SOLID support as to why they think the way they do.

For all reading groups...reading logs are DUE tomorrow. This means the students must have 4 entries on their charts and ONE letter written to me using ONE of the ideas on the list in the packet.

We ended the day by revisiting the production process and completing a written activity independently.