Thriving Thursday

This morning the children began their day in Art.

When they returned to class, we watched a video of an interview with the author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, Jeff Kinney.  While viewing the interview, I modeled taking notes.  Both before and after this, I shared the importance of this skill, explaining they will use it in high school and college, at the very least.  One students made the connection of understanding the main idea and knowing what ideas are important to write down!  :-)

Next, I shared this list of good question starters:
Why...?
How would it be different if...?
What are the reasons...?
Suppose that...?
What if...?
What if we knew...?
What is the purpose of...?
What would change if...?

I demonstrated the difference between a closed question (one word answer...yes/no) and an open question.  Then we watched a video interview with Dav Pilkney, the aurhot of the Captain Underpants series, and I noted the questions asked.  We identified that only one question was worded similar to the question starters above.  Next, we rewatched part of the Jeff Kinney interview and noticed that ALL of the questions asked of him began with good question starters.  Additionally, we realized that his interview provided more information in a shorter period of time.

While I continue informal testing, the students continued working on their third grade newsletters (revising and editing each article and exploring publishing options), in their small groups.

In math we reviewed pictographs and then we watched an enVision video clip and created a bar graph including all of the "must have" items we identified earlier in the week.  There is a pictograph worksheet for homework and we will NOT have a quiz tomorrow.

Following lunch and recess, I will be at an in-house meeting.

The children will work on their newsletters.

Then they will finish writing their production plans for their goods they will make for the patients at the JHU children's oncology unit.  Finally, to end the day, each group will share their plan with the rest of the class.

I will be out of the building tomorrow.

My next post will be Monday!