During reading today, we worked on the strategy known as Active Listening in Pairs. Two heads are better than one, but too often when students read together, one does the reading and the other is off on Cloud Nine! I explicitly teach this collaborative structure for working in reading partnerships, so the students know the expectations when working together, practicing a reading skill/strategy!
After practicing Active Listening in Pairs, we used this collaborative structure to do some close reading! With a teammate, we reread passages from Ballad of Mulan in order to annotate sentence(s) that support the Big Idea of Mulan as a selfless individual, and we also jotted down some quick notes of to explain our thinking when we annotated the sentence(s)!
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| Using those Text Codes to point out important info! And take a look at those margin; definitely explaining one's thinking as he's reading! |
We had a Writer's Workshop session today, and focused on Silent Writing today, as well as picking up another strategy to help us brainstorm small moments! Silent Writing is a procedure that supports those who need pure silence to brainstorm ideas. We spend the first 10 minutes of independent writing in Silent Writing mode; today I had to pull the class back to the carpet several times during Silent Writing time to review expectations of during time, as a few individual had a rough time time keeping silent! Practice, practice, practice make perfect!
During math, we were introduced to the topic known only as perimeter! We watched a quick video on Brain Pop Jr (username and password can be had via e-mail,) and went outside to practice measuring the sides of various plane shapes on the playground with our shoes as the unit of measurement!
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| Notice in the background how some students went above and beyond, and added up all the sides to find the perimeter! |
We then went back inside and created various plane shapes on graph paper, delineating the perimeter with one color, and the area inside the shape another color!
Near the end of the day, we discussed the routine of homework, had an exit ticket before we left!
Show a way to decompose 27 + 67, and add those decomposed parts on a number line to explain your thinking
That's a wrap folks! Cheers, and have a good one!
