Cause and Effect

Again, a really nice day overall.

We began today with a look at our seventh Thinking Map, the Multi-Flow map. This diagram looks a bit like one of those flow charts they use to teach computer programing in Basic. Its purpose is to help students to understand the ideas of cause and effect. Now this is a surprisingly hard idea for the fourth grade mind. Children are accustomed to the idea of sequence -- indeed, in compositions just about every sentence can begin with the word "then" -- but understanding that one thing happens because of, or in response to another action, is not something that they easily grasp. And yet no concept is more important for Science or History or even literature.

Our Multi-Flow Map was about "My Dream." The students were asked to think of what they would ideally like to achieve in their lives. They had some interesting choices. Many wanted to be actresses or sports superstars, of course, but others chose such realistic goals as zookeeper or fashion designers. They were then asked to think of what they would have to do to achieve that goal. Many were pretty accurate about understanding the prerequisites for the field they chose. They did tend to underestimate the price of mansions in Beverly Hills, however.

We reviewed the Toto story, looking this time to "make connections" between the text and their own lives. I'll talk more about that tomorrow. We also corrected the math test. This was a mixed result -- many excellent scores, but also a number of disappointing ones. We'll do some review here, particularly with the students who need it, and take the alternative form of the test in a week or so. We'll give the better of the two scores to the students.

We worked a little more on music today. This was the only rough point of the day. Doing some of the basic preparation activities for singing, exercises things involving breathing and vocal control seemed to bring out a particularly silly side in some of the boys. It was much better when we moved on to working on finding the rhythm in jump rope rhymes. We'll be developing a beginning sense of rhythmic notation from this as well as learning to change these chants into body percussion pieces.

The end of the day was a kind of workshop where students could work on math or the language arts homework. It was peaceful and everybody was working quite intently.

Home Studies: (1) Independent Reading. I will be collecting the first group of journals tomorrow. (2) "Toto" story packet. There are quite a few pages here, and the most important of these are the three pages of questions in the middle of the packet. (3) We started the second math assignment sheet. This will be due September 27.