Everyone now and then, we need to take some time to get caught up on a few loose ends and and today was one of those days. The boys and girls had about 40 or so minutes to finish up their:
- Social Studies journal from Monday
- Reading Response Letter for A Bear in War
- a few bits and pieces from their Math workbook
As usual, everyone worked very hard to get their work done and by the end of the day we have everyone all caught up and ready to start fresh tomorrow. Isn't that a nice feeling? To have all the things on your "to-do" list all finished!
I'm also pleased to see that fewer and fewer students are having to take their Morning Jumpstarts home at night for completion. My hope is that in the coming weeks all students will have them completed during class time. I provide between 20 and 30 minutes each day and when I create the Jumpstarts, my goal is to give the students a task that practices skills, can be done independently, but does not take longer than 25 or so minutes to complete. On average, most students complete them in about 20 minutes.
In Math, we looked at addition strategies today. Our focus was on using "near doubles" to add (e.g. 4+5). I took a little poll after the lesson and asked the kids, "How many of you use near doubles to help you add?" and very few hands went up. It seems that good ol' memory work is what most kids rely on for single digit addition. The bottom line is whatever strategy helps kids to be successful is the best one and that's where our lesson will begin tomorrow.
Speaking of tomorrow, we're going to take the next leap in our "writing about reading". We're moving on from Reading Response Letters (we'll come back to those again later). We're going to talk about "Reading Response Questions with Evidence", or RRWE. The boys and girls will start learning about the importance of providing evidence from the text to support their ideas. I'll have more to say about RRWEs tomorrow.
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