Wet Wednesday

Our day began with our first class meeting.  These will be held weekly.  The purpose is to allow students to have a voice in our classroom and to build respect and trust within our group.  Typically we will start with a group share where each student will have the opportunity to complete a phrase.  For example, today's group share was to finish the phrase, "One thing you might not know about me is..."  The next portion of our meeting is compliments.  The children have a chance to compliment or thank another person in our class for something they have done.  Finally, we will usually end with challenges.  In this section we will discuss challenges that arise in class, brainstorm ideas to fix them and agree on an action plan to follow.

Today we began with the group share.  Then the children used their morning work assignment to ask question they are wondering about me.  Finally, we shared some compliments.  I didn't want to begin sharing challenges this soon!  :-)

After that Mrs. Benson came in and conducted a lesson about rounding 3 digit numbers to the nearest 100, while I continued informal reading assessments.

Next, I reviewed the TASS skills we will be focusing on this marking period.  TASS stands for thinking and academic success skills.  Collaboration and analysis are the two we will focus on for the first nine weeks.

Then we began preparing for our first writing piece.  This piece will be a personal narrative relating a time that your child performed a good deed for the common good.  To help brainstorm topics, we viewed and discussed a Power Point presentation with many photographs of people performing good deeds.  Then students worked collaboratively , with partners, to orally rehearse their ideas.  Finally, each students shared their partner's (not their own) good deed.  WE recognized that being responsible for what your partner says, forces you to be a better listener!

Following lunch and indoor recess Mrs. Howard visited to do a lesson, which integrated nicely with our science lesson from yesterday, about personal character traits.  The remainder of the afternoon was spent identifying traits personal to each student and visiting wordle.net to create images reflecting our unique personal character traits.  Unfortunately, we had many technological challenges.  Therefore, some students haven't completed this task.  They will tomorrow!

HOMEWORK:  Read for 20 minutes and complete even/odd math worksheet