Wonderful Wednesday

This morning we held our weekly class meeting.  During the group share the students explained their feelings about their personal academic goal.  One student warmed my heart by taking a risk and admitting she was bored by hers!!  I heard a lot of positive feedback but the negative helps me determine what changes and tweaks need to be made.  :-)

After sharing compliments and thank yous, we discussed the challenge of how we will know when each student has met their personal academic goal and who should make that decision (student or teacher).  Most of the class felt that the student should make that call but they should be required to show growth in their knowledge before moving on to a new goal.

Finally, the students began drafting personal academic goals for math.  I will look these over and meet with the children to finalize their goals and develop a plan.

After our meeting, we went to the computer lab to get a preview of the PARCC assessment.  We will be taking the online PARCC reading test next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday mornings.

Next we returned to the classroom and began our math rotations.  During the teacher led rotation we used number lines to compare fractions with the same numerator.  The students played fraction Tic Tac Toe, again, during guided practice.  At the technology rotation the students used the site, Thirteen Ways to Make a Half, to practice identifying halves.

For HOMEWORK there is a worksheet with optional/required challenge problems on the back side.

Today, during the reading and writing block, the students worked on independent reading group assignments.  Then they watched a Learn Zillion lesson about revising their writing to include dialogue and inner thinking.  After that, they continued writing, illustrating and revising their realistic fiction picture book.  If they had extra time, they researched their culture and worked on their personal academic reading goal.

Sharks:  We began group by decoding some challenging words from chapter 6.  We focused on identifying parts of the word we knew.  Then the children whisper read chapter 6 as I listened in.  After that we discussed why Lily was sad at the end of the chapter.  I had planned to end group there but the students were asking many questions about the Statue of Liberty.  So, we grabbed an iPad and used information from History.com to answer come questions.

Pandas:  I met with this group before lunch to avoid running out of time, as we did yesterday.  We discussed the quote on page 142 beginning with, "This is goodbye Victor..." Then we revisited the end of the chapter, where Peter came eye to eye with a German, or so he thinks, soldier.  Finally, we read and discussed chapter 23 out loud.

Following lunch and indoor recess the students continued working independently while I met with more groups.

Dolphins:  The students reread Elephant and Tiger and created a chart in their RRJ to list words with -er, -ar and -ur from their book.  We reviewed these charts in group and then revisited the concept of cause and effect.  Then the students added an example of cause and effect, from their story, to the a cause and effect chart in their RRJ.

Cheetahs:  The students read the historical note independently then we reread it and discussed it in group.  After that we talked about different ways authors might go about writing either a historical or realistic fiction book.  Finally, we reviewed the concept of cause and effect.  The students created a chart in their RRJ and identified an example from their book. 

We ended the day by designing and beginning to build a container to keep an ice cube from melting for 30 minutes.