Week 6

Reading
The students were really digging deep this week to think critically and respond to questions about their novels in discussion groups. The students are reading Wringer, Pictures of Hollis Woods, The Boy Who Saved Baseball and Replay. We tweeted to Sharon Creech, the author of Replay, and the following day she had favorited our tweet. We are still waiting to hear back from her about the title of her next novel. The students were in awe that the author of a book they were reading was on twitter, that she saw our tweet and that she knows our class is reading her novel. 

The students have been participating in face to face discussions and last week we introduced the concept of online discussions using Moodle Forum. Miss Yesnes, our student teacher, taught a lesson on questioning and how to write thoughtful questions as you read. 

The students also learned this week how to activate their minds during reading by annotating the text using symbols and sticky notes. They were using their metacognition to make connections, draw conclusions, pinpoint important parts, ask questions, acknowledge when they were confused and point out vocabulary words that were unknown to them. Mrs. B modeled this while reading aloud The City of Ember and then students tried it on their own. We were blown away with their thoughtful and insightful annotations about the book's characters, setting, and plot.

Science
The students are becoming scientist and gardeners as we explore our Environments Unit. Each group planted a terrarium filled with barley, corn, pea, radish and clover seeds. The students are very eager each morning to check out their container to see what has sprouted and how the seeds are growing. This week they will measure their plants, decide how much to water and free their plants by taking off the cover.

On Friday the students started a new investigation that will determine what amounts of water are optimal for each seed. Hopefully they will see some changes before we leave for MEA break.

Digital Citzenship
Our focus was on the lesson by Common Sense Media titled Picture Perfect. The students watched this video which shows how an ordinary woman gets made to look like a "perfect" woman on a billboard. They then watched this video which shows how we see ourselves vs. how others see us. The thoughtful statements by the students were inspiring and brought a few tears to our eyes. We will continue talking about this important topic this week and look at how magazines fool us into thinking and believing what is not true or real.


Math
Math this week consisted of learning how to multiply using a variety of methods and figuring out which one worked best for each student. We learned how to multiply using partial products, (what I call) traditional, Lattice and Lattice plus (thanks to Moni's reminder). 

The students also tested their reaction times by trying to see how fast they could react to catch a falling piece of paper. They compared the results between their right and left hands to see what side had a faster reaction time. This week we will finish up unit 2 and test on Wednesday. After MEA break we will start Unit 3 which focuses on Geometry.